© 2024 LES EDITIONS ALBERT RENÉ / GOSCINNY- UDERZO / ASTERIX ® OBELIX ® IDEFIX ® IDEAFIX ©
Adorno and Horkheimer say that “laughter […] always accompanies the moment when a fear disappears.”
After the Second World War, Europe is reborn with the promise of domesticating violence and banishing fear.
With God dead, only the fear of men remains.
Once this is attenuated, horizontal laughter spreads.
A great middle layer can foresee your life in the long term and nothing prevents a daily laughter from bearing fruit, a sign of the lightness that men and women find when they do not face the unforeseen events of existence alone and their days are not a truce before times worse.
The
Asterix series
It is paradigmatic of the massification of laughter in Europe during the second half of the 20th century.
The Gauls of the irreducible village are not afraid of anything either because, like superheroes, they have a definitive weapon, the magic potion that acts as a safety net and leaves the citizens with the only concern of pursuing their private and commercial interests, their styles. of life, and occasionally seek violent entertainment with the Romans.
Between fights and fights, the possibility of free and egalitarian humor reigns in the village, which the series in turn applies to the national stereotypes of French, Italians, Lusitanians, Spaniards and many others, causing pan-European laughter, an Erasmus program of the humor, which reduces the distances between the nationals of each country while accentuating the small differences, making everyone (Bretons, Corsicans, Swiss, etc.) laugh at themselves.
Consider that since the first issue,
Asterix, the Gaul
, in 1959, more than 300 million books in the series have been sold around the world.
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The Gauls laugh and the Europeans laugh when the only thing left is the fear that the sky will fall on their heads, as Abraracurcix, head of the village and joker from secularized times, fears.
Panoramix also laughs, the druid who acts as a serene guru, wise man and sorcerer detached from the land (he is not seen eating) but attached to the village and its inhabitants, always ready to offer his arts for good defensive causes.
These essentially pagan Gauls ("By Tutatis!") resemble the French who, according to Emmanuel Todd's diagnosis, find themselves without a horizon of meaning, without transcendence, without God, without the sacred, without something of which they do not know. can laugh
Anguished atheists in a situation of metaphysical risk, this is how the French sociologist defines the spiritual state of the French and, to a certain extent, also of Europeans, the hypersecularized exception in a still religious world.
The village chief is only afraid of the sky falling on his head: he fears and unconsciously desires the sudden revelation of the falsity of his paganism.
The prophecy that transcendence will one day come crashing down on the village is yet another joke of the secular age and its loose beliefs.
The village that Goscinny and Uderzo built to make readers laugh has an anti-elitist, horizontal organization.
Although it does not have democratic mechanisms, its structure is anti-authoritarian.
The taunts circulate freely among the villagers who only take themselves seriously as an excuse to get involved in some mess that always ends in revelry in the heat of the fire.
A sign of this are the verticality problems of the chief whose authority is never fully respected by the bearers of the shield on which he appears in public.
The boss is defenestrated from the throne in each chapter, as Lefort said of democracy, characterized by “the structural inability of those who exercise public authority to find a definitive anchoring point.”
The Gauls operate in a slight horizontality as opposed to the clumsy totalitarianism of the Romans.
These conspire among themselves, while in the village ambitions are moderate, except when some external influence introduces tares or an internal conflict tests their principles.
The magic potion is the key to freedom.
The village under the effects of the drug has phenomenal power that can only be used in legitimate defense or for charitable purposes, following the principles that normatively underpinned post-war Europe.
The constant siege of the Romans endows the Gauls with the heroism of resistance, giving them the energy necessary to not degenerate.
He always keeps them ready to fight the enemy, with continuous scenes that highlight some form of violent action with onomatopoeia of blows, little stars and bumps.
These rude jokes—since it is always a joke that Obélix crushes a Roman with his menhir or someone suffers a head injury from a doped villager's punch—they tell us that there is no freedom without the exercise of force, covering up this truth about the republican condition. with the veil of laughter.
The ideology of much of the children's television series produced today is less optimistic.
Citizens lose control over their lives, the sky is covered with clouds and the future lacks a future.
For this reason, children's fiction becomes more pedagogical, less playful.
The genre of mini-superheroes
always ready for the next mission and only allowing jokes and laughter between emergencies
is remarkably successful .
There is a tendency to prevent children from contemplating violence at an early age while entertaining them with firefighters from a world in which environmental risks are highlighted.
Some funny character will trip to provoke a laugh, but the rest of the action is aimed at resolving serious emergencies in orderly and fragile environments.
This being the case, it is advisable to train children so that at any moment they abandon their games and go out to fight the catastrophe to come.
Children do not laugh at the adventures of these little animals and superheroic characters who trust infinitely in technology to neutralize catastrophes.
Characters are no longer crushed, bombed, gassed and defenestrated like in
The Pink Panther
, The Roadrunner
or
Tom and Jerry
.
The audiovisual content offered meets the standards of violence permitted by the authorities of each country and accentuates uplifting messages (cooperation, mutual help and care, friendship, etc.).
The result is comics that, by not being able to use violence, have lost a key resource to provoke hilarity.
Furthermore, they have to appear to transmit an appropriate and educational message, while using all the technical means at their disposal to enchant children in front of the screen.
The result is fast-paced montages with entertaining plots about emergencies that must be fought.
Children are invited to view catastrophes with the same light smile with which survivors in the post-apocalyptic world will celebrate having passed an everyday test.
When the sky finally falls on our heads, it will not catch citizens off guard.
Daniel Gamper
(Barcelona, 1969) is a philosophy professor.
This excerpt is a preview of
What Are You Laughing About?
Benefits and Havoc of Joking
, by Herder, which is published this February 20.
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