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Please forgive the platitude of such philosophical statements. As he formulates them, Pirandello seems to be putting together an anthology and, unconsciously, to be parodying at least three-quarters of contemporary philosophy. Even at the stylistic level, his essay echoes quotations that extend in range from Walter Pater's Essay on the Renaissance to Michelstaedter's little-known La Persuasione e la rettorica (Persuasion and the Art of Rhetoric). Be that as it may, that's the way life is. Well, then, what can the artist do about it? He must resort to Humor, which in disrupting conventions and lifting up the mask, acts as a metalinguistic idiom on the petrified idiom with which we usually represent and explain life to ourselves. Since normally we are covered by the masks of logic and morality, Humor reveals us to ours as opposite to what we think we are, and therefore as utterly comical. |
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But as there is no cause for laughter when we find ourselves within a comic situation, so there is very little cause for even a smile when art "alienates" us from the situation, as it doubles the man with the actor, the actor with the character. You can smile, if you so choose, but the reason you smile would also suffice to make you cry. And this is so because Humor reveals to us the mechanism of life, but without telling us why it is what it is. Therefore, Humor and the Comic cannot exist; or if they exist, they coincide with Tragedy. |
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There is certainly humor in defining Humor through its very opposite. Now, at the beginning of his essay, Pirandello quotes Rabelais as saying, "Pour ce que le rire est le propre de l'homme," without realizing that Rabelais is in turn quoting a topos of medieval Scholasticism. Propre, or proprium, is the characteristic that is being added to a definition by species and kind, in order to indicate more clearly and unmistakably certain members of a given species. Man, for instance, is an animal; among all animals, he is the rational one, but he has, as that which is proprium to him, the faculty of being also ridensand no other animal, even admitting that there be some that are rational, can laugh. |
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In showing to us that man is an irrational animal, Pirandello should also demonstrate that man cannot laugh. Instead, he writes his essay "Humor" in order to prove that, of all the animals, man is precisely the one who can laugh (as in fact he so often does). The entire essay aims, in an unconscious and contradictory way, at proving that the only animal that can laugh is precisely the one that, because of its own irrationality and its own constant frustration in the attempt to rationalize it, has no reason to laugh at all. To put it even better, one laughs only, and especially, for very serious reasons. |
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Perhaps that's why man causes others to laugh at him. But if this is the |
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