Uè, there is too much slam!

This article is published in issue 48 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until November 30, 2021

In the era of inclusiveness and the web, what place parochialism and dialectal caricatures, comic masks with a marked accent like that of the Dogui, the unforgettable Guido Nicheli of Christmas holidays (“Alboreto is nothing”)? As of this writing, the release of the Zerocalcare series for Netflix on Facebook and Twitter Tear off along the edges it is accompanied by a vibrant controversy over the Roman speech of its protagonist.

I make a tranchant joke about the toponymy of Rome and that of Milan: I get tens, hundreds, finally thousands of likes, and a surplus of indignant, enraged, outraged comments. The primacy of bell towers in Italy is alive and well. It would be enough to look at the programming of cinemas: on 7 December it comes out I drop everything and open a chiringuito, the feature film works before Milanese Imbruttito, the Facebook page that made the Milanese nature of the “taaac” the key to its boundless success.

The protagonist – of the page and of the film – is Germano Lanzoni, actor and comedian (“jester”, he prefers to say) 55-year-old originally from Brusuglio, a hamlet of Cormano, northern Milanese suburbs, former home of Alessandro Manzoni. For everyone and for synecdoche, since 2016 it is simply him, Il Milanese Imbruttito, the personification of the Milanese all billing and indignity. In the film he finds himself entangled in a not too sophisticated scam suffered by a businessman acquaintance who, taking advantage of his working burnout (get used to unsolicited angles: we are in Milan), trims a ruin on the most remote coast of Sardinia, where he does not even take the mobile phone. He, eager to leave the unsustainability of the office, accepts. But invoicing will be difficult. The direction is by the comic collective of Il Terzo Segreto di Satira, which with the project of Milanese Dirty has a long-standing partnership, and they also appear in the cast Claudio Bisio, the youtuber Favij, Valerio Airò, Benito Urgu, Laura Locatelli, Paolo Calabresi, Simonetta Columbu, the rapper of Club Dogo Jake La Furia ed Elettra Lamborghini. And voila, here’s the cinepanettone that came from the internet.

As did a joke page created by three college students – Tommaso Pozza, Marco De Crescenzio and Federico Marisio – at the end of an alcoholic evening to finish at the cinema? He explains it to Vanity Fair Pozza himself, CEO and for today spokesperson for the group: «Milan is ironic and self-deprecating. He knows how to accept the joke and take the piss, something not taken for granted: in other places, starting from Rome, we could not have staged such a thing. Here it worked because there was understanding ». Tommaso, in the language of the character of his brand, is a “giargia”: he came to Milan from Padua for the university, he was an off-site. «At the base of the success of the Milanese Imbruttito some people laugh because they recognize each other, or because they recognize us “: the first plural person because this time the speaker is Lanzoni, the Imbruttito himself.