"In some cases, viewers may find the over the top version of a character more entertaining than their original, subtler version, and can also be a result of the author having more creative enthusiasm for the distilled version. There has been serious study on why this works with audiences. Philosopher Henri Bergson in his essay “Laughter” wrote that comedy is based on inflexible behaviour, i.e. living people acting mechanically in their trademark manner, however inappropriate the circumstances. Early examples: Malvolio (from William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night) will always be self-important and anal-retentive and is thus easily gulled. Jack Benny will always be stingy, even with a gun to his head."

"Bergson is hardly quoted now. We have forgotten the major philosophical event he was for the French university and which he remains for world philosophy, and the role he played in the constitution of the problematic of modernity. Isn’t the ontological thematization by Heidegger of being as distinguished from beings, the investigation of being in its verbal sense, already at work in the Bergsonian notion of durée, which is not reducible to the substantiality of being or the substantivity of beings? Can we continue to present Bergson according to the alternative suggested by the banal formula in which the philosophy of becoming is opposed to the philosophies of being? Do we not find, moreover, in Bergson’s last works, a critique of technical rationalism, which is so important in Heidegger’s work? Creative Evolution is a plea for a spirituality freeing itself from a mechanistic humanism… Bergson is the source of an entire complex of interrelated contemporary philosophical ideas; it is to him, no doubt, that I owe my modest speculative initiatives."

"The totality in which a thinking being is situated is not a pure and simple addition of beings, but the addition of beings who do not make up one number with one another. This is the whole originality of society. The simultaneity of participation and non-participation is precisely an existence that moves between guilt and innocence, between ascendancy over others, betrayal of the self and return to the self. The relationship of the individual to the totality, which thought is, in which the / takes into account what is not itself and yet is not dissolved in it, assumes that the totality is manifested not as a milieu brushing against the skin, so to speak, of living being as an element in which it is immersed, but as a face in which being faces me… Things as things derive their original independence from the fact that they do not belong to me—and they do not belong to me because I am in relation to the men they come from. Hence, the relationship of the / with the totality is a relationship with human beings whose face I recognize. Before them, I am guilty or innocent. The condition of thought is a moral consciousness."