AVID: Main Idea Assessment ALL

AVID: Main Idea Assessment

PRACTICE IT: Determine Stated or Implied Main Idea

Read the following passage about the meaning of laughter before answering Numbers 1 through 4.

from “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic” by Henri Bergson

What does laughter mean? What is the basal element in the laughable? What
common ground can we find between the grimace of a merry-andrew, a play upon
words, an equivocal situation in a burlesque and a scene of high comedy? What
method of distillation will yield us invariably the same essence from which so many
different products borrow either their obtrusive odour or their delicate perfume?
The greatest of thinkers, from Aristotle downwards, have tackled this little problem,
which has a knack of baffling every effort, of slipping away and escaping only to
bob up again, a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation. Our excuse for
attacking the problem in our turn must lie in the fact that we shall not aim at
imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition. We regard it, above all, as a living
thing. However trivial it may be, we shall treat it with the respect due to life. We
shall confine ourselves to watching it grow and expand. Passing by imperceptible
gradations from one form to another, it will be seen to achieve the strangest
metamorphoses. We shall disdain nothing we have seen. Maybe we may gain from
this prolonged contact, for the matter of that, something more flexible than an
abstract definition—a practical, intimate acquaintance, such as springs from a long
companionship. And maybe we may also find that, unintentionally, we have made
an acquaintance that is useful. For the comic spirit has a logic of its own, even in its
wildest eccentricities. It has a method in its madness. It dreams, I admit, but it
conjures up, in its dreams, visions that are at once accepted and understood by the
whole of a social group. Can it then fail to throw light for us on the way that human
imagination works, and more particularly social, collective, and popular
imagination? Begotten of real life and akin to art, should it not also have something
of its own to tell us about art and life?