Humor Italian Style

Abstract

In this work, I propose a reading of comedy Italian style as a genre characterized by the rejection of the themes and elements of traditional comedy narrative that dominated the Italian box office until the late 1950s. In opposition to the working-class ethic of neorealist comedy, comedy Italian style narrates the advent of a consumerist lifestyle in the urban middle class after the postwar collapse of the national symbolic edifice. In this view, the economic boom represents a sort of Lacanian master-signifier that ties the community together in the way described by Žižek in The Parallax View: “Let us imagine a confused situation of social disintegration, in which the cohesive power of ideology loses its efficiency: in such a situation, the [master-signifier] is the one who invents a new signifier, the famous ‘quilting point,’ which stabilizes the situation again and makes it readable” (2006, 37). With the decline of patriarchal authority and the birth of the democratic “society of brothers,” the actual “boom,” before being a real event, was a revolution in the Italian social imaginary that posited individual desire as the only source of symbolic gratification. Hence the country could find itself happily reunited around the same goods and habits, desiring the same things and performing the same show in the public sphere.

If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so.

(Jacques Lacan, Presentation on Psychical Causality)