Happiness Quote by Henri Bergson

Laughter, for Bergson, isn’t a private spasm of joy; it’s a social instrument with a quiet edge. “Always” is the tell: he’s not describing the occasional contagious giggle, he’s staking a claim that comedy is structurally communal. Even when you laugh alone at a book, you’re borrowing an invisible audience - the norms, expectations, and shared codes that make the joke legible in the first place. The group is present as a ghost jury.

The intent sits in Bergson’s larger project in Laughter (1900), where he argues that the comic punishes “the mechanical encrusted upon the living.” What a community laughs at is what it wants to correct: stiffness, vanity, obliviousness, over-earnestness, the person who can’t read the room. That’s why his line feels less like a warm celebration and more like a cool diagnosis. Laughter is a sanction disguised as pleasure, a low-cost way of enforcing flexibility and social intelligence.

The subtext is about belonging and exclusion. Group laughter draws a bright boundary: we get it; you don’t. It can be bonding, but it can also be disciplinary, even cruel - a reminder that the group has standards and that noncompliance has consequences. Bergson is writing in a moment when mass urban life and modern institutions are tightening social scripts. His point anticipates today’s call-out culture and meme economies: humor still works as collective alignment, a way for a crowd to synchronize judgment at speed.