L’humour et la communication. Le lien entre émotions et cognition

Humor and laughing always reveal a kind of individual tension that projects itself on the collective (that may, obviously, be only two) and that absorbs the uneasiness of the other, following a process of complex communication and capillarity, though brief. According to Bergson, humor addresses the intelligence and anaesthetizes sensitivity. In contrast, Umberto Eco says that humor is just the sentiment, even if the conversational rules (as defined by Paul Grice) are breached. This paper questions the separation between sensitivity and intelligence, because their conjugation truly constitutes “the peculiarity of man”.