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Page 163
11
Pirandello Ridens
1.
In 1907, Pirandello began to publish a series of essays and lectures on the theme of what he called "umorismo," which he later put out in a volume in 1908 and republished in 1920 with a polemical answer to objections raised by Benedetto Croce. 1
Croce had easily dismissed Pirandello's attempt because he himself had defined Humor and the Comic once and for all. For Croce, Humor was a psychological mechanism that served to define certain human situations, not an aesthetic category, that would stand in need of definition. Croce, as we have come to know him, was a past master at dismissing problems by defining them as pseudo problems. This allowed him to pose only those problems for which he had already found the answer.
It is rather easy to see how this kind of procedure would not suit Pirandello at all, for Pirandello was used to posing only those problems for which there can be no answer. By posing the problem of Humor, Pirandello could in fact be truly pleased with himself. From his point of view, the problem of the Comicof which Humor is certainly a subspecies or varianthad the advantage of always having caused embarrassment to those philosophers who had tried to define it.
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This is the text of a paper translated by Gino Rizzo and presented at the Pirandello Society section of the Modern Language Association, December 28, 1968, Denver, Colorado, and subsequently published in Altro Polo: A Volume of Italian Studies (University of Sydney, 1978).

 
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