Happiness Quote by Henri Bergson

Laughter, for Bergson, isn’t the cuddly social glue we like to market it as; it’s a quiet instrument of discipline. The line lands because it punctures the innocence we attach to humor and replaces it with a colder mechanism: ridicule as community enforcement. “Unavowed” is the tell. He’s not claiming we consciously set out to wound; he’s arguing the opposite is precisely what makes laughter powerful. It can punish without owning the punishment. You get to say “I’m just kidding” while the group gets to register who stepped out of line.

The verbs do the philosophical heavy lifting. To “humiliate” is to push someone down the social hierarchy, to reduce their claim to dignity. And “consequently” is Bergson’s bleak causal link: correction isn’t a noble aim but the downstream effect of public shaming. Laughter becomes a soft police siren, one that doesn’t sound like law, just like fun.

Context matters: Bergson is writing in the era of rapid urbanization and mass social life, when “the neighbor” is less a close friend than a fellow citizen you constantly jostle against. In his broader theory of the comic, laughter targets the “mechanical” in the human - stiffness, awkward repetition, the person who can’t adapt. The crowd laughs to snap them back into flexibility, back into social rhythm.

It’s a cynical thesis, but it’s also recognizably modern: from office banter to meme culture, humor routinely plays judge and jury, enforcing norms while pretending it’s only entertainment.