Since humor has taken root in my life, I wonder a lot about what is the best way to use it to best convey what I would like to say. But getting the right key isn’t always easy, because humor and comedy are powerful but also extremely complex tools.
Achille Campanile said that “the humorist is one who instinctively feels the ridicule of clichés and therefore is drawn to do the opposite of what others do“. I am very close to this definition, it represents me a lot, and I think that “doing the opposite of what others do” is often influenced by one’s own vision of the world.
This is one of the reasons why laughter is so subjective, not everyone laughs with the same intensity and not everyone laughs at the same things. Humor evolves over time, along with the changing community, and if this doesn’t happen it can become a very divisive topic. How it happened for the monologue of Pio and Amedeo, aired on Canale 5 during the last episode of Happy Evening.
Last Friday, within the program, the comic duo brought a piece on the now famous politically correct. According to Pio and Amedeo, one should be able to say everything, even those words born of terrible prejudices and used to address black people, LGBTQ +, women, Jews, because it is not necessary to condemn the terms, but the wickedness that resides in the finality. In short, for Pio and Amedeo the words do not count, the intention counts.
Too bad that instead words do matter, and we have had many examples over time. I am sure that from his point of view Trump had very good intentions when he wrote in one of his books: “women are aesthetically pleasing objects”. Yet I do not think there are doubts about the gravity of those words, and of many others expressed by him.
Pio and Amedeo, however, did not limit themselves to the linguistic question, they went further, they pitted a series of homophobic and sexist stereotypes worthy of a truly ultra-dated comedy, managing to flatten and downplay a complex topic such as discrimination. I firmly believe that we can and should make humor about everything, but we must know how to do it, because important topics deserve an equally important humor.
The fact that a program like Happy Evening being broadcast in prime time with a monologue like that, without any kind of repercussions, that’s exactly the mirror of this country that is still struggling to evolve, and above all to listen. As Francesco Costa wrote in his Instagram Stories: “Politically correct does not exist in Italy. Anyone who wants to say racist, homophobic, sexist and discriminatory things can do it, he has never stopped doing it, he has never paid a price for doing it, even when he has even been rewarded: now he has simply found a new alibi to continue to justify his own and the mediocrity of others. “
It is quite disconcerting to note how much a considerable slice of people is really convinced that today in Italy nothing can be said anymore, that there is a sort of censorship, when a piece that is profoundly harmful to minorities and marginalized people was broadcast, and exactly the day after, at the concert on May 1st, Fedez had to challenge the discontent over his text in order to publicly expose the declarations of the opponents to DDL Zan.
At this point I wonder, are we really sure we know what cannot be said in our country?
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