In a world of absolute permissiveness and complete anomie no carnival is possible, because nobody would remember what is being called (parenthetically) into question. Carnival comic, the moment of transgression, can exist only if a background of unquestioned observance exists. Otherwise the comic would not be liberating at all. Because, in order to display itself as liberation, it would require (before and after its appearance) the triumph of observance.
And this would explain why the massmedia universe is, in fact, at once a universe of control and regulation of the consensus and a universe based on the commerce and consumption of comic patterns. Laughing is allowed precisely because before and after the laughing, weeping is inevitable. The comedian doesn’t need to reiterate the rule because he is sure it is known, accepted without discussion, and it will remain all the more so after the comic license has allowed—within a given space and through an intermediary mask—violating it in jest.
“Comic” is, in any case, an umbrella term, like “play.” We must still ask ourselves if, in the various subspecies of this highly ambiguous genre, there isn’t room for a kind of activity that plays differently with the rules, to allow exercises also in the interstices of the tragic and, eluding by surprise, this murky commerce with the code, which would condemn the comic in general to act as the best safeguard and celebration of the code.
I believe we can identify this category with the one Pirandello opposed to the comic, or articulated with respect to it, calling it humor.
The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it. We need not discuss this still-Crocian terminology. An example of the comic might be a decrepit old woman who makes herself up like a young girl; humor would insist on asking also why the old woman acts like that.
In this development I no longer feel superior and detached toward the bestial character who acts against the proper rules; I begin to identify with him, I suffer his drama, and my laugh is transformed into a smile. Another example that Pirandello offers is that of Don Quixote as opposed to the Astolfo of Ariosto.
Astolfo arriving on the moon riding a fabled hippogriff and, at nightfall, seeking a hotel as if he were a commercial traveler, is comic. But not Don Quixote, because we realize that his battle with the windmills reproduces the illusion of Cervantes, who fought and lost a limb and suffered imprisonment for his illusions of glory.
I would say, furthermore, that the illusion of Don Quixote is humorous, when he knows or should know, as the reader knows, that the dreams he is pursuing are by now confined in the possible worlds of an outmoded chivalrous literature. But then, at this point, Pirandello’s hypothesis meets ours. It is not by chance that Don Quixote begins with a library. Cervantes’ work does not assume knowledge of the intertextual scenarios on which the adventures of the madman of La Mancha are modeled, reversing their outcomes. It explains them, repeats them, discusses them again, just as a tragic work recalls the rules that will be violated.
Humor thus acts like the tragic, with perhaps this difference: In the tragic the reiterated rule is part of the narrative universe (Bovary), or, when it is reiterated at the level of the structure of discourse (the tragic chorus) it still is uttered by the characters; in humor, on the other hand, the description of the rule should appear as an intrusion, though concealed, of the author, who reflects on the social scenarios in which the enunciated character should believe. Humor then would be excessive in metalinguistic detachment.
Even when a single character speaks of himself and upon himself, he is split into judge and judged. I am thinking of the humor of Woody Allen, where the threshold between the “voices” is hard to distinguish, but, so to speak, makes itself heard. This threshold is more evident in the humor of Manzoni, marking the detachment between the author, who judges the moral and cultural world of Don Abbondio, and the actions (interior and exterior) of Don Abbondio himself.
In this way humor would not be, like the comic, victim of the rule it presupposes, but would represent the criticism of it, conscious and explicit. Humor would always be metasemiotic and metatextual. The comic of language would belong to the same breed, from Aristotelian witticisms to the puns of Joyce. To say, “Green ideas without color sleep furiously” could be (if it didn’t resemble poetry) a case of verbal comic, because the grammatical norm is presupposed, and it is only by presupposing it that its violation appears evident (hence this sentence makes grammarians laugh, but not literary critics, who are thinking of other rules, already of a rhetorical nature, and hence of second degree, that would make the sentence normal).
But to say that Finnegans Wake is a “Scherzarade” reconfirms, as it conceals, the presence of Scheherazade, of the charade and the scherzo in the very body of the transgressive expression. And it shows the kinship, the basic ambiguity of the three repeated and denied lexemes, and the paranomastic possibility that made them fragile. For this reason anacoluthon can be comic and the lapsus for which we are not asked the reasons (buried in the very structure of what others call the signifying chain, but which is actually the ambiguous and contradictory structure of the encyclopedia).
Wit, on the other hand, and the pun are already kin to humor: They do not arouse pity for human beings, but distrust (which involves them) of language, in its fragility. But perhaps I am confusing categories that must be further distinguished. In reflecting on this fact, and on the relationship between reflection and its times (chronological times, that is), I am perhaps opening the door, just a crack, onto a new genre, the humorous reflection on the mechanism of symposia, where one is asked to reveal in thirty minutes what is le propre de l’homme.
1980
The end
