Source: The London Prat | Region: Kingdom of Spain | Period: c.1500 to present
Spanish humour is the comedy of a country that invented the modern novel through the mechanism of a joke — a man so thoroughly addled by reading too many chivalric romances that he mistakes windmills for giants and sheep for armies — and that has spent the 420 years since Don Quixote's publication finding new and increasingly sophisticated ways to exploit the gap between how things are and how people insist on seeing them. It is a humour of irony, of dark absurdism, of the esperpento — the grotesque, distorting vision that sees life as it actually is by showing it at an angle that makes the distortion visible — and of a relationship with death so frank and so intimate that it produces comedy of a kind that more squeamish cultures find difficult to process.
Spanish humour is also the humour of a country of profound regional diversity — Castilian, Catalan, Basque, Galician, Andalusian — each with its own language or dialect, its own comic traditions, and its own understanding of what is funny and why, united by a shared national character that combines passionate seriousness about important things with an equally passionate willingness to find those important things absurd. The Spaniard who wept at the bullfight yesterday is, today, laughing at its ritual pomposity. These are not contradictions; they are the same response to the same fact, viewed from different angles.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Alcalá de Henares, 1547-1616) wrote the first modern novel, which is also, in many interpretations, the funniest novel ever written, which is also, in many interpretations, the saddest novel ever written — a combination that Cervantes would have considered entirely appropriate. Don Quixote (Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615) is the founding text of Spanish comic literature and one of the founding texts of Western literature generally: the story of a man whose reading has convinced him that the world is more heroic, more meaningful, and more romantically organised than it actually is, and whose encounters with actual reality are consequently both comic and tragic in proportions that shift with every reading.
The comedy of Don Quixote operates on multiple levels simultaneously, which is why it has sustained 420 years of reading without exhaustion. At the surface level it is a parody of chivalric romances — a genre joke that would have been immediately legible to its original audience and that is considerably less legible now, since the genre being parodied no longer exists. At a deeper level it is a comedy of epistemology — of how we know what we know, and what happens when our framework for understanding reality is radically incompatible with the reality we encounter. At the deepest level it is a comedy about comedy itself: about the relationship between story and life, between the version of reality we prefer and the version we are given, and about the question of whether the person who prefers the better story is simply foolish or is, in some way, more honest than the people who accept the worse one. Don Quixote is, in this reading, not deluded but correct, and the comedy is at the world's expense rather than his — which is, appropriately, the reading that Don Quixote himself would have preferred.
Cervantes also wrote Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novels, 1613), a collection of short prose works several of which are comic masterpieces, and El coloquio de los perros (The Dialogue of the Dogs), in which two dogs discuss the absurdities of human life with a clarity and wit that their owners conspicuously lack. The talking-animal satire is a very old form, but Cervantes' version is among the best: the comedy of observers who have no investment in the social game they are watching and consequently see it with perfect clarity.
Running alongside Cervantes, and in many ways preceding him, is the picaresque tradition — the genre of the roguish anti-hero narrator, the pícaro, who survives in a corrupt society by being more adaptable and more honest about the corruption than the society's nominal moral authorities. The picaresque novel — originating with the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and developed through Francisco de Quevedo's El Buscón (c.1604-08, published 1626) — established a comic mode that spread across European literature: the first-person narrator who survives by his wits in a world that conspires against him, and whose account of his survival is simultaneously funny, dark, and socially revealing.
Francisco de Quevedo (Madrid, 1580-1645) deserves particular attention as the Spanish writer whose comic range most completely spans the spectrum from the vulgar to the sublime. His satirical prose — particularly the Sueños (Dreams, 1627), a series of comic visions of the afterlife in which historical figures, social types, and abstract virtues are subjected to savage satirical examination — is Swiftian in its precision and Rabelaisian in its energy, and predates both by a generation. His sonnets include some of the most accomplished comic poetry in any language; his political satires cost him years of imprisonment. He regarded both the poetry and the imprisonment as the expected cost of telling the truth, which is a position that subsequent Spanish satirists have maintained with some consistency.
The most specifically Spanish contribution to the theory of comedy is the concept of the esperpento, coined by the playwright and novelist Ramón del Valle-Inclán (Villanueva de Arousa, 1866-1936) to describe his method of distorting reality to reveal its true nature: the comic grotesque that shows life as it is by showing it as it is not quite. In his play Luces de Bohemia (Bohemian Lights, 1920), Valle-Inclán has a character explain the concept through the image of the concave mirror — the fairground distorting mirror that makes tall people short and short people tall — and proposes that this is the appropriate lens through which to view Spanish society, since the society itself is so thoroughly distorted that only a further distortion can reveal its actual shape.
The esperpento is not merely a theatrical technique but a philosophy of comic perception: the idea that the most accurate representation of an absurd reality is itself absurd, and that comedy is not a departure from truth but its most reliable vehicle. This concept — which has strong affinities with the grotesque tradition in Gogol, with the absurdism of Kafka, and with the dark comedy of Samuel Beckett — is a specifically Spanish formulation, and it runs through subsequent Spanish comedy from Luis García Berlanga's films to Pedro Almodóvar's early work to the contemporary political satire of the television era.
Spanish film comedy reached its peak in the work of Luis García Berlanga (Valencia, 1921-2010), whose films — Bienvenido, Mister Marshall! (1953), El verdugo (The Executioner, 1963), La escopeta nacional (National Shotgun, 1977) — constitute one of the great bodies of political film comedy in any national cinema. Working under Franco's censorship, Berlanga developed a method of embedding devastating social criticism within apparently innocuous comedies of Spanish provincial life: Bienvenido, Mister Marshall!, which satirises both American cultural imperialism and Spanish obsequiousness toward it, and El verdugo, which makes of an executioner who does not want to execute people one of the most uncomfortable comic protagonists in film history, both managed to be passed by censors who presumably either missed the point or considered it wiser to pretend they had.
Pedro Almodóvar (Calzada de Calatrava, 1949) is the director whose work most completely embodies the post-Franco liberation of Spanish comedy: films of extravagant colour, melodramatic plot, and a relationship with transgression that functions simultaneously as celebration and as satire of the repression that the transgression is replacing. His early films — Pepi, Luci, Bom (1980), What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984) — are the comedies of a culture discovering, with considerable exuberance, what it is permitted to say now that it is permitted to say things. His later work is darker and more formally accomplished, but retains the essential Almodóvarian proposition that life is both more tragic and more comic than it has any right to be, and that the appropriate response to this fact is a film with a very bright colour palette.
Spanish television comedy — particularly the satirical programme Cruz y Raya and the sketch comedy of José Mota — represents a mainstream tradition of considerable commercial success and occasional political sharpness. The contemporary stand-up scene, centred on Madrid and Barcelona, has produced figures including Berto Romero and Andreu Buenafuente (the Catalan comedian and television presenter whose late-night programme Late Motiv represented the closest Spanish equivalent to the British political panel show).
Catalonia has its own distinct comic tradition in Catalan, including the figure of Joan Monleón and the broader tradition of Catalan satirical theatre that has maintained, throughout the periods of Castilian cultural dominance, a comedic resistance to cultural assimilation that is itself both funny and politically significant. The Catalan comedian who performs in Catalan in Barcelona is making a statement with every word that the joke's content sometimes only slightly complicates.
Andalusia contributes a warmth, a physicality, and a relationship with comic timing rooted in flamenco's rhythmic precision that distinguishes it from the drier wit of Castile. The Andalusian joke — told at speed, with gesture, and with an assumption of audience participation — is a performance rather than a narration, and its comedy depends as much on the telling as on the told. The tradition of gracia — the specifically Andalusian quality of charm, wit, and effortless social ease — is the comic ideal of the South: the person who is funny without appearing to try, warm without appearing to calculate the warmth, and in possession of precisely the right word at precisely the right moment, which they will deploy with a timing so natural it appears accidental.
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Source: The London Prat | Cross-references: Latin America; France; Italy; Portugal.