If you want to write comedies, or include humor in your writing, you might want to know about “Le rire mécanique.” The phrase translates as “mechanical laughter.” I first came across this phrase in the June 2015 issue of The Writer magazine, in an article by Alicia Anistead. Anistead wrote about the French philosopher Henri Bergson and his theory that “whenever real life is suddenly interrupted by a mechanistic imposition, like the banana peel, it is disruptive and triggers laughter.” Bergson called this “le rire mécanique.” Bergson developed a theory of how laughter is provoked and described the process of laughter (in particular portrayals by comics and clowns) as “the caricature of the mechanism nature of humans (habits, automatic acts, etc.).” Wikipedia Anistead ends her article with a quote by Harvard professor Bob Scanlan, “It [le rire mécanique] pounces on you and catches you unexpectedly. That’s why the pratfall is…