Source: The London Prat | Region: Italian Republic | Period: c.500 BCE to present
Italian humour is the comedy of a country that invented two of the most consequential comic forms in Western theatrical history — the commedia dell'arte and the opera buffa — and that has spent the centuries since either exporting them to the rest of the world or watching the rest of the world export them back in forms that no longer work quite as well. It is physical, gestural, dialectally rich, rooted in local community and family, and possessed of a relationship with the absurdities of political life so long-established — Italy has had, since 1946, an average of one government per year, which is either a democratic achievement or a satirical gift depending on one's perspective — that political comedy is less a genre than a reflex.
Italian humour is also the humour of a country that takes beauty, food, family, and football with an intensity that other cultures find excessive and that produces, at the intersection of that intensity and ordinary life's inevitable failure to match up to it, a comedy of passionate disappointment: the opera fan who finds the soprano slightly flat, the grandmother whose pasta is perfect and who knows it and will tell you so, the football supporter whose team has just lost a match they should by rights have won. These are not small disappointments; in Italy they are treated with the seriousness they deserve, which is what makes them funny.
Commedia dell'arte — the Italian professional comedy of masks, improvisation, and stock characters that flourished from the mid-16th century through the 18th — is the single most consequential contribution to Western comic performance in any tradition. Its masks and characters — Arlecchino (Harlequin), the acrobatic, quick-witted servant; Pantalone, the avaricious Venetian merchant; il Dottore, the pedantic Bolognese doctor; il Capitano, the blustering soldier; Pulcinella, the anarchic Neapolitan hunchback who became Punch in England and Polichinelle in France; the Innamorati, the young lovers who speak in verse while everyone else speaks in prose — constitute what is effectively an alphabet of comic character types that subsequent European drama has been combining and recombining ever since.
Commedia was performed outdoors, in marketplaces and public squares, by professional troupes who were simultaneously actors, acrobats, musicians, and improvisers working from lazzi — set comic routines that could be inserted into any scenario — and from canovacci — plot outlines rather than fixed scripts, within which the performers improvised freely. Its relationship with its audience was direct and physical: the Arlecchino who ran into the crowd, the Pantalone who addressed the spectators directly, the slapstick beatings conducted with the iconic slapstick (the double-paddle bat that produced a loud noise without causing injury, thereby solving the problem of stage violence with characteristic Italian practicality).
The commedia tradition spread across Europe — the Comédie Italienne in Paris, the Harlequinade in England, the influence on Molière, Goldoni, Gozzi, Jonson, and Shakespeare — and its stock characters and techniques remain the underlying grammar of a significant proportion of Western comic performance. The sitcom's recurring character types, the sketch comedy's comic archetypes, the stand-up comedian who addresses the audience directly — all are, in structural terms, commedia performing in new clothes.
Carlo Goldoni (Venice, 1707-93) reformed Italian comic theatre with the simultaneous audacity and courtesy of a man who tells an old friend that their best habit is also their worst one. His campaign to replace commedia's improvisation and fixed masks with written plays of fully developed character — conducted through a prolific output of comedies (he wrote over 150 plays) that demonstrated, simply by existing and being excellent, that the reform was possible — produced an Italian dramatic comedy of psychological depth and social observation that influenced European comedy well into the 19th century.
Goldoni's comedies — La locandiera (The Mistress of the Inn, 1753), Il servitore di due padroni (The Servant of Two Masters, 1745), Le baruffe chiozzotte (The Choggia Brawls, 1762) — are comedies of Venetian social life: of the lagoon city's merchants, servants, aristocrats in decline, and the women who navigate all three worlds with considerably more intelligence than the men who nominally control them. Mirandolina in La locandiera — the innkeeper who systematically demolishes the misogynist boasts of a guest who claims immunity to feminine charm, and then, having demolished him, dismisses him — is one of the great comic heroines of European theatre: a character whose intelligence and self-possession are both the source of the comedy and its most satisfying resolution.
Italy's profound regional diversity — the country was politically unified only in 1861, and its cultural unification has been proceeding, at varying speeds, ever since — produces comic traditions of considerable distinctiveness that the national comedy partially conceals. Neapolitan comedy is the most internationally recognised regional variant: warmer, more physical, more immediately emotional than the Northern Italian comedy, rooted in the streets, markets, and tenements of a city whose relationship with poverty, beauty, and organised crime has provided more than sufficient comic material for several centuries.
Eduardo De Filippo (Naples, 1900-84) is the supreme figure of Neapolitan comic theatre: a playwright, director, and actor whose comedies — Natale in casa Cupiello (Christmas at the Cupiello House, 1931), Filumena Marturano (1946), Napoli milionaria! (1945) — combine the Neapolitan folk comedy tradition with a dramatic depth and social seriousness that make them difficult to categorise as simply comedies, but impossible to categorise as anything else. His Natale in casa Cupiello, in which the patriarch Luca Cupiello's obsessive annual construction of an elaborate Christmas nativity scene — il presepe — becomes the vehicle for a study of family, delusion, and the stubborn persistence of joy in the face of everything, is one of the great comic works of the 20th-century European stage.
Sicily contributes its own distinct strain through the tradition of opera dei pupi — the Sicilian puppet theatre of armoured knights, epic battles, and betrayals, whose combination of high melodrama and comic excess has been performing continuously for over two centuries — and through the literary comedy of Luigi Pirandello (Agrigento, 1867-1936), whose plays and novels explore the comedy of identity, illusion, and the impossibility of knowing who anyone, including oneself, actually is. Pirandello's comedy is the darkest in Italian literature: the comedy of the person who has discovered that the self is a performance with no performer behind it, and who finds this discovery simultaneously liberating and terrifying.
Dario Fo (Sangiano, Varese, 1926-2016) received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997 — an award that caused considerable consternation among those who thought Nobel prizes should go to writers who make their readers feel that serious literature is serious, rather than writers who make their readers feel that serious literature can also be extremely funny and that this does not make it less serious. Fo's plays — Morte accidentale di un anarchico (Accidental Death of an Anarchist, 1970), Non si paga! Non si paga! (Can't Pay? Won't Pay!, 1974), Mistero Buffo (Comic Mystery, 1969) — are works of furious political comedy: farcical in structure, Marxist in politics, commedia in technique, and produced with the conviction that laughter is not merely compatible with political seriousness but its most effective expression.
Mistero Buffo — in which Fo performs alone, as a medieval giullare (jester), reworking religious stories from the perspective of the poor and the excluded — is the most complete expression of the Italian comic tradition's relationship with authority: the jester who speaks truth to power in the only language that power cannot directly prohibit, because prohibiting the laugh would be an admission of what the laugh is about. The play was broadcast on Italian television in 1977 and attracted 8 million viewers; it was denounced by the Vatican as "the most blasphemous show in the history of television," which Fo regarded as a very good review.
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Source: The London Prat | Cross-references: France; Spain; Northern Italy; Southern Italy; Sicily.