The Law and Comedy (eBook)

Giuseppe Rossi, Paola Carbone (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023
233 Seiten
De Gruyter (Verlag)
978-3-11-128776-8 (ISBN)

Infos

Despite their inherent seriousness, the law and those who practice it, be it lawyers, judges, politicians, or bureaucrats, are amongst the most popular objects of comedy and humour. Sometimes even the mention of the law, or the mere use of legal vocabulary, can trigger laughter. This is deeply counterintuitive, but true across cultures and historical eras: while the law is there to prevent and remedy injustice, it often ends up becoming the butt of comedy. But laughter and comedy, too, are also infused with seriousness: as universal social phenomena, they are extremely complex objects of study. This book maps out the many intersections of the law and laughter, from classical Greece to the present day. Taking on well-known classical and modern works of literature and visual culture, from Aristophanes to Laurel and Hardy and from Nietzsche to Totò and Fernandel, laughter and comedy bring law back to the complexity of human soul and the unpredictability of life.

Giuseppe Rossi, associate professor of comparative private law - IULM University, Milan, Italy; Paola Carbone, associate professor of English language and literature - IULM University, Milan, Italy.

Textauszug

Foreword to the English edition

This is the English edition of our study Diritto e comicità, first published in 2021 by Giappichelli, Turin, in the series Studi e ricerche, edited by the Centro di Ricerca per l’Estetica del Diritto (Research Centre for Aesthetics of Law) – CRED of the Università Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria, under the direction of Daniele Cananzi and Ettore Rocca.

The text is unchanged, with the sole exception of some minor adaptations in order to make some examples related to Italian literary and film works more understandable for English-speaking readers.

Two appendixes by Giuseppe Rossi were added, thanks to suggestions by Vincenzo Zeno-Zencovich and Paolo Heritier.

We would like to thank the directors of the Law and Literature series, Daniela Carpi and Klaus Stierstorfer, for hosting our volume, the Director of the Department of Humanities, Giovanna Rocca, and the Director of the Department of Business, Luca Pellegrini, of IULM University for funding our research, Myrto Aspioti, Stella Diedrich, and everybody at De Gruyter for their valuable help, and, of course, our readers, for their time, attention, and, hopefully, critical remarks. This is but a first step in the largely uncharted territory of law and comedy.

The essay is dedicated to the memory of Paolo Villaggio (Genoa, 1932 – Rome, 2017). Villaggio was an Italian writer and comedian, whose work, besides casting an invaluable light on the Italian society of the 1970s–1990s, is an original reflection on the condition of humans who must cope with the hostile determinism of existence, without losing their capacity to imagine that some change may be about to come. In a sense, Villaggio’s work is a perfect synthesis of the law and comedy relationship.

 

Milan, March 18, 2023

Giuseppe Rossi and Paola Carbone

Preface

This book has taken its cue from some impromptu conversations: law, despite its innate seriousness, and the instinctive association with justice that it arouses, constitutes one of the areas most frequented by comedy, in all its forms. Not only farces, but more or less elegant comedies, satire, jokes, cartoons, humorous comics often feature politicians, judges, lawyers, policemen, bureaucrats and other characters from the world of law. Sometimes it is the rule of law itself or the legal way of thinking (not to say the legal worldview) that provides the subject matter, or the pretext, that comedy uses to provoke laughter.

Joseph Heller’s oft-cited anti-militarist satirical novel Catch 22 is an example:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle

‘That’s some catch, that Catch-22,’ he observed.

‘It’s the best there is,’ Doc Daneeka agreed.1

The ridiculousness of the rule that triggers the short circuit of the “catch 22” lies not only in its bureaucratism, or in its circular structure, but in highlighting, finally, the absurdity of the idea of normativity as the expression of a power: the rule decides that aviators cannot avoid flying missions, even though these are foolish, and therefore sane individuals are naturally inclined to avoid them. So, the rule tells us that taking part in flying missions, risking one’s life to kill other human beings, is madness that must be committed because someone, who has the legal power to do so, has decided it. That power finds its foundation in a certain worldview, which that law makes its own, and which it makes binding on those subject to it. War is a legitimate part of such worldview.

The rule of law not only obliges one to set aside all ethical perplexity, but also supersedes the very rule of rationality and self-preservation, which dictates that one must avoid madness. All this, besides being disturbing, is actually a little ridiculous.

To oppose it, by the way, would be childish. It is no surprise, however, that the gaze of childhood, with its mixture of astonishment and judgment (in the sense, of course, not of experience, nor of technique, but of some innate and intransigent capacity for evaluation), is among those congenial to the comedian. To adults alone, children’s speech often appears unintentionally comic. In reality, the child cannot but be a child, and in the same way, a comedian cannot but be comic. As Paolo Villaggio recalled when he was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement by the Venice Film Festival in 1992: comic talent is

a genetic quality, impossible to invent. But the comedian never becomes an adult, he always remains a child, he never loses his childish behavior: like Laurel and Hardy, like the Marx Brothers. A comedian never kisses his partner: if he falls in love, he is not successful.2

A character like Pierre Bezuchov comes to mind, not without some grotesque traits. When he appears at Anna Pavlovna Schérer’s soirée, he is “a stout, heavily built young man, with close-cropped hair, spectacles, the light-coloured breeches fashionable at that time, a very high ruffle and a brown dress coat,” who arouses in the hostess “a look of anxiety and fear, as at the sight of something too large and unsuited to the place.” However, “her anxiety could only have reference to the clever though shy, but observant and natural, expression which distinguished him from everyone else in that drawing room.”3

The childishness (very affluent and somewhat profligate), and the sharp as well as arbitrary judgements that characterise Pierre at the beginning of the novel (from which he will develop some wisdom, through experience) shine through in his dialogue about the war with Prince Andrew, who is about to leave to join his unit:

‘[…] this is what I have been thinking and wanted to tell you. There is a war now against Napoleon. If it were a war for freedom I could understand it and should be the first to enter the army; but to help England and Austria against the greatest man in the world is not right.’

Prince Andrew only shrugged his shoulders at Pierre’s childish words. He put on the air of one who finds it, impossible to reply to such nonsense, but it would in fact have been difficult to give any other answer than the one that Prince Andrew gave to this naïve question.

‘If no one fought except on his own conviction, there would be no wars,’ he said.

‘And that would be splendid,’ said Pierre.

Prince Andrew smiled ironically.

‘Very likely it would be splendid, but it will never come about …’

‘Well, why are you going to the war?’ asked Pierre.

‘What for? I don’t know. I must. Besides that I am going …’ He paused. ‘I am going because the life I am leading here does not suit me!’4

Prince Andrew invokes the juridical dutifulness of war (“What for? I don’t know. I must”), but from Pierre’s “childish” interlocution (depicted in an ironic, not overtly comic manner) humanity emerges in the form of the young man’s dissatisfaction and desire for action and fulfilment (“I am going because the life I am leading here does not suit me!”). Thus, the non-juridical, but comical (childish) view of the dutifulness of war leads one to wonder whether law, by its normativity, imposes war as something irrational, unwanted, and ultimately inhuman, or whether it merely embraces the innate irrationality of the human, giving it a semblance of rationality, and with it a basis of dutifulness.

Of course, not all rules of law compel one to do something as ethically questionable as war. Rules of law, in general, aim to prevent injustice, which is a very worthy thing to do. So, at least in terms of intentions, they belong to the realm of the good. Yet, strangely enough, the comedian does not laugh at injustice (at evil), but at law (at the remedy), and at those who attempt to administer it, such as legislators, judges, lawyers, policemen. From this standpoint, law and medicine share the same fate. Since antiquity and the commedia dell’arte, it is not the disease that is mocked, but the physician who attempts to cure it, perhaps by flaunting a science he does not possess, or which he overestimates.

The first attempts to investigate the relationship between law and comedy have revealed another significant aspect. Laughter, and the comedy that arouses it, are extremely complex phenomena, which have always engaged many areas of thought, starting with philosophy. It may well be said, from this point...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 4.10.2023
• Reihe/Serie: ISSN
• Reihe/Serie: ISSN
• Reihe/Serie: Law & Literature
• Reihe/Serie: Law & Literature
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Film / TV
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• Schlagworte: Comedy • Humour • Law • Literature
• ISBN-10: 3-11-128776-9 / 3111287769
• ISBN-13: 978-3-11-128776-8 / 9783111287768