In this episode I couldn't help thinking of Tati. "Something mechanical encrusted upon the living" was essentially his bottomless subject in movies li...

I was watching Fleabag tonight and thought of this essay.p.s. I snipped a graf that went into a lot of detailed examples from French theatre. Sorry no...

I really like this section. About halfway through, it really becomes something quite beautiful and profound.On this read-through I'm struck by how man...

In which we learn that sitting is funnier than standing. I'm not sure I buy it but who am I to argue with Napoleon? Presented and produced by Eli Sess...

There's a passage in here that makes the hair on my neck stand up. "There is a logic of the imagination which is not the logic of reason, one which at...

Bergson died in 1941. I really hope he was fit enough to get out to the cinema in 1936 to see Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, a manic, joyful literali...

Comedy's relationship with ugliness and beauty. ("Unsprightly vs unsightly" - nice one, Cloudesley!) The listener may wonder why Bergson's having this...

Imagine you had the power to invoke a command performance of the funniest standup in the world, doing her routine just for you, at your house. It woul...

On the cutting room floor: a bit of the introduction; the transformer humming on a hard-to-reach piece of equipment; the word "table d'hôte" which I p...

A little bit about the translator Cloudesley Brereton's wife: she was Maud Brereton. There's a photograph of her on the Cambridge University website, ...