Whoever makes people laugh takes risks.
In the failed joke we experience the vulnerability of the comedian, that extremely uncomfortable silence that penalizes those who do not know how to be funny.
Other times, the joke collides head-on with someone who feels offended by their convictions or their power.
Humor is always in danger of amending the whole.
We all have plots where we reserve the right of admission of laughter and irreverence.
As the Electrobuendes used to say: "Hey, don't laugh at the Malfunction Witch."
Among so many palisades, one suffers more to amuse than to move the respectable.
Despite so many suspicions, laughter gives us life. Literally. In a third century Egyptian papyrus, the Leiden Cosmogony, a peculiar version of Genesis is preserved where laughing is the creative act: “When God laughed for the first time, light appeared. He laughed a second time, and out of the water came the Earth. When he wanted to laugh for the third time, intelligence appeared (…) In the sixth time, time sprang up. When he laughed the seventh time, the soul was born ”. This smiling spirituality contrasts with a certain disapproving look on loud and uninhibited laughter. Through the centuries, good manners have dictated that fine people — and, above all, women — shouldn't be hooting. For this reason, the impudent laughter of Claudia Cardinale in
Visconti's
El gatopardo
, or those of Julia Roberts in
Garry Marshall's
Pretty Woman
are portrayed as rude.
In the cinema, villains laugh more readily than heroes;
the wicked laughter of Cruella de Vil and other beautiful brothers is almost a subgenre.
And yet he laughs.
An anthology of jokes entitled
Philogelos
has survived from Roman times.
. Misogynistic jokes abound, about misers — he was such a nasty fellow that at the time of making a will he named himself heir — about drunkards or bad breath, about the idiocies of supposedly intelligent people, and regional accents or costumbrista ironies. A hairdresser asks: “How do you want me to cut your hair?”; the client asks: "In silence." The inhabitants of Abdera played the same role in the jokes as those of Lepe among us. Curiously, there are no racist jokes: that classist society looked at the size of the bag more than the color of the skin. The irreverent Monty Python dared to adapt their jokes about slaves and crucified, with memorable moments like the song
Always Look on the Bright Side of Life
, from
The Life of Brian
.
Now and always, the best humor is the one that does not laugh at the weak, but at what we love the most — that is, at ourselves — and at power. Fussy, authoritarian rulers often clash with comedians: satire appeals to a wider audience than serious dissent. Perhaps that is why so many old comedies were lost, in addition to Aristotle's treatise on laughter, but not the tragedy. The murderer imagined by Umberto Eco in
The Name of the Rose
explains the danger posed by the famous Aristotelian book: "From here the Luciferian spark could jump that would light a new fire throughout the world, and laughter would be capable of annihilating fear" . Goya saw his
Caprichos
Withdrawn from circulation, Chaplin irritated Hitler and the censorship was primed with Buñuel, Azcona and Berlanga. Luis Alegre tells us in
¡Hasta siempre, Mister Berlanga!
that a censor suppressed a general shot of Gran Vía from the script. “If it were another, nothing would happen. But Berlanga is capable of putting three bishops out of the Pasapoga cabaret ”. When the filmmaker learned of the event, he regretted not having listened to the proposal: he would have shot it with great pleasure. His corrosive black comedy
The Executioner
was banned in all cinemas: laughter is a risky profession.
The old comic utopia aspires to restore equality, to reveal the artifice of hierarchies and social differences. If laughter — as healthy as it is besieged — could create the world, perhaps they will transform it. And if not, in our age of anger, the sense of humor will undoubtedly remain the most fun virtue.