HISTORIANS of science have been slow to spot the link between Charlie Chaplin and Henri Bergson, the French philosopher who believed in elan vital as the essential biological force which God somehow puffed into cells. Scenting a gap in the intellectual market, here goes.

In 1908, Bergson took time off from the deeper truths of life and science to produce a theory of laughter. His experimental research consisted largely of visiting every French comedy and farce playing on the Parisian boulevards. I like to think of him jotting down any reactions to characters losing their trousers or being locked in cupboards full of sneezing powder. The moment the audience burst out laughing, it went into the notebooks. Bergson concluded that we laugh 'when something mechanical is encrusted on the human'. In French, it sounds grand rather than clumsy. His point was that we giggle when we see human beings, creatures of alleged free will, act like machines which have no will at all.

Bergson clearly influenced Chaplin profoundly. In the funny Chaplin movies, the Little Tramp is always getting crumpled, blown away or flattened. Big men, powerful winds or something else reduce the all too human Chaplin to the status of an object, something mechanical. Hence we laugh. One to Bergson! The world could probably have coped without this historical connection and I probably wouldn't have bothered to fill this gap in the intellectual market if I hadn't come across one of those splendid new academic journals recently. It's called Humor and it is, of course, deadly serious. Humor invites contributions on the theoretical, empirical, experimental and cultural aspects of humour. In fact, it seems that anything is welcome, so long as it isn't funny. That wouldn't be scientific.

Psychologists study humour largely because it's much easier to study than laughter. Laughter is interesting and, perhaps, important. It was once argued that humans are the only animals to laugh. Then it was found that apes do it, too. The problem with laughter is that it's hard to create in the laboratory. It's spontaneous. To catch it requires patient observation out in the field, and largely depends on luck. In these cost-conscious days, few grant-giving bodies would be inclined to give you funds to hang around schools, offices or factories waiting for the data to happen. Real laughter is hard to trap in the behavioural test tube.

Humour is much more controllable. All you need to do humour research is a collection of jokes. You gather different sets of subjects and ask them to rate jokes. If you're lucky, men with punk hair styles who overeat will rate jokes differently from women who are addicted to Mills and Boon books and go to the hairdressers every Saturday. Ask each group to rate their appreciation on a seven-point scale and, at once, you've got scientific results.

Humor is full of such studies. Two stand out as especially wondrous.

The University of Tel Aviv has examined how humour works in marriages. This, to my mind, looks like an excellent Jewish academic joke. The result: 92 per cent of couples use humour 'in married life'. Don't conclude that the couples that laugh together last together. Husbands used humour more than wives, which suggests that divorce may be in the offing as many men take umbrage if their jokes are rebuffed.

The second piece in Humor updates a controversy that has racked the humour world for years. Do men or women appreciate sexual, hostile and nonsense jokes to different degrees? The researchers didn't actually ask any subjects which jokes fell into which category, but at least the experimental jokes used were passable. For example, a sexual joke which victimised men shows a nude couple after they have made love. The man is miserable. The woman is saying: 'I think you're being silly. Would you like it better if I was thinking of you and sleeping with Robert Redford?' A nonsense joke asks what a bee sounds like flying backwards. Zzub.

Contemporary males show their incorrigible sexism by enjoying sexual jokes more. But with hostility, enjoyable complications occur. The researchers found that male subjects enjoyed hostile jokes which victimised women while women enjoyed hostile jokes which victimised men, as in the Robert Redford substitute. Here's the controversy. In the past, women preferred hostile jokes which victimised their sisters. Not so now. Is this feminism at work? Humor also reports the curious finding that men like cartoons more than women do.

Eager to promote the study of humour, the journal also invites academics to submit syllabuses and notices of activities which honour the subject. Praise the University of California which runs a course on humour covering everything from the physiology of humour to the sociology of ethnic jokes. Those who take the course will surely know a joke when they see one. Praise, too, the Association of Therapeutic Humour. It announces in Humor that it awards life membership to individuals to 'honour exceptional understanding of the roles humour and laughter play'.

I'm not suggesting that humour isn't a proper subject for scientific inquiry. But the paradox is painfully obvious. Can you study humour without humour? If you do so, can you begin to understand the phenomenon? Meanwhile, I shall be submitting a paper entitled 'The Influence of Bergson on the Comedic Style of Chaplin'. That sounds serious enough.

David Cohen is editor of Psychology News.