He Looked Into The Reaper's Eyes And Nervously Spirits

In Jeffrey Klassen's essay, “He Looked Into the Grim Reaper’s Eyes and Nervously Laughed,” he describes Henri Bergson's theory on comedy and applies it to the movie Office Space. Bergson's take on humor presents three key ideas. The first of these is that comedy is purely intellectual and not emotional. When we laugh at something that happens to someone else or anything we see on screen, we are able to take emotion out of the equation just for a moment and only focus on what is funny about what we see and hear--whether we understand why we find this funny or not. The second theory offered is that laughter can be used to correct society's behavior. One example of this can be better explained by thinking about how you may feel when someone laughs at you for doing something in a particular way. The feeling that comes with being the target of a
The final idea presented by Bergson is that comedy itself can be identified as "the mechanical encrusted upon the living", which is referring to the machine-like characteristics that a person may have. Klassen's essay presents a modification of Bergson's theory, using his own ideas based on Ernest Becker’s book, The Denial of Death. Many of the ideas presented in Klassen's essay can be applied to the movie, The Big Lebowski, along with the 40s film noir style.
The Big Lebowski has such a large cult following for a couple different reasons. The first of which being that the more you watch the film, the more things you may notice that you didn’t notice before, whether it be quotable and witty lines that you didn’t catch the first