This week concludes the trilogy about Italy and comedy (the first bit was about Italian dubbing, the second about comedic Italian stereotypes). In this third chapter I interview Chiara Galeazzi, an Italian journalist and TV writer who has been able to carve out rare spaces of discussion about comedy in a country where the genre is often treated like a “Cinderella of the arts”. I know many of you are not Italian, but I promise the conversation we had is super interesting in general (especially if you come from a place where stand-up was “imported”) and wherever possible I included English Wikipedia links to the most local references. Scroll down etc, you know the drill.
I know I already linked stuff from this account, but then again it captures the current mood 100% - and also give me a break, it’s a pandemic.
Thought I’d balance the link above with a more positive message. I am pretty sure I linked stuff from this account as well, but this post is all about accepting your limits, right?
This is actually interesting. Two Native Americans commenting memes about the infamous Buffalo Horns Riot Guy.
Instead of writing one of my usual tirades, today I talk comedy and Italian culture with Chiara Galeazzi. I came across Chiara’s work when she was writing a comedy column for Vice. I don’t remember many journalists taking the topic seriously back then (or now, for that matter), so I started following her on Twitter. Since then, Chiara has transitioned towards TV writing in her own right, but also continued to explore and discuss the comedic in all its forms across a range of media. Most notably, she ran a super interesting radio program titled “Spassolini” (it’s a lovely pun in Italian, I won’t attempt a translation) and is now a regular on Comedy Talk (a YouTube panel show where Italian TV writers, stand-up comedians, and other guests talk industry and culture, with an eye on both the country and the rest of the world). Below is a condensed version of our chat, interspersed with some images/clips from the shows we mention.
I know you have been writing about comedy for a while, but when did you start getting involved?
When I started covering the topic for Vice around 2010 I was not really into Italian comedy. By 2008 both Mai Dire Gol and Zelig were over, and the whole Serena Dandini world was also about to finish; at the same time, I had started discovering American stand-ups after the once revered Daniele Luttazzi came under fire for plagiarism. That was what I was into while I was writing at Vice, so my first piece was about Stephen Colbert. Around 2013 I met Saverio Raimondo at one of his gigs, as I was discovering this whole new Italian stand-up scene that was still shaping up. He liked my articles and I suggested I’d write for him. I was able to contribute to CCN, his Comedy Central show, and wound up staying for all the following seasons, including the current one with Michela Giraud. As it happens, one thing led to another and I started doing it on a regular basis. Joke writing is not my primary job, but I mostly work as a TV writer and a lot of the shows I do are comedy shows.
I was drawn to your work because there are not a lot of spaces in Italian media where people take comedy and its language seriously. You see more and more comedians talking about the industry amongst themselves, like they do overseas, but I think what you did on Vice and with Spassolini (and now with Comedy Talk) is still quite rare.
I have always been into comedy beyond stand-up or TV, and the first things I started growing into as a kid were books. When you see the language of comedy is not something exclusive to your time, but it’s always been there, you start asking yourself questions. English humorists from the XIX and early XX century, American writers around the turn of the millennium… they use a certain language, speak about certain topics. What does that say about the time they lived in?
I think the Italian debate about cabaret and stand-up is also interesting on a historical level. It may be a joke now, but I think it must mean something if, at some point, comedians felt the need to step away from what at the time was known as cabaret. These are things I love thinking about, although it kind of affects your ability to enjoy comedy sometimes, especially if you are also writing comedy yourself. You also start thinking about the market: why are there so many jokes about Tinder now? And so on. That’s why it’s also interesting to talk about this with the comedians themselves, who obviously talk about their own experiences.
A clip from “La TV delle ragazze”, a pioneering feminist comedy sketch show authored by Serena Dandini and others. An example of the “Dandini world” mentioned above.
Why do you think comedy is not taken as seriously in Italy?
In Italy TV comedy is only discussed by TV critics. When I started writing about it the consensus was that Zelig ruined comedy, that “cinepanettoni” were shit, that Checco Zalone was someone we kind of only half-liked. We did not really write about American sit-coms (also because if you watched them you were probably downloading them illegally), so comedy was just this sub-genre of TV that people did not respect as much as they did movies, for example.
On a more general level, I think the issue is that comedy is made with a very specific goal: making people laugh. This is why it’s not experienced as art, as a cultural thing that opens people’s minds. It’s like the Cinderella of the arts. There is an escapist nature to laughter, and its language sometimes cannot get too close to things, because otherwise it becomes depressing. Just look at comedy books: they are always tucked away behind the gardening section, even when they are good. That is, if they are Italian - it’s not the case with David Sedaris, who is an incredibly funny humorist (although not a comedian) and he can be taken seriously because he’s American.
I think this is a critical point. Some people in Italy (those skeptical about this new wave of enthusiasm for stand-up, for example) think certain things are coming as a sort of cultural import, that they’re too derivative.
That’s one reason the whole cabaret VS stand-up thing does not make much sense, considering people writing monologues have always existed in Italy. Calling it stand-up is pure marketing in this sense, it’s just a way to tell people they are not about to see someone doing a zany character in a costume, like they did on TV. It is true it is imported, but then again how many cultural products do we consume from overseas? It’s part of us by now. Luttazzi was just a comedian to me, I did not care whether he was doing stand-up or not.
Things were complicated by the rise of this new generation, with this new language – and obviously Twitter and memes made comedy much more pervasive in general, it has become a fundamental language in contemporary communication. How can you not talk about it? Beyond the language, however, many of the new comedians I interviewed (for example on Spassolini) also have a whole vision behind their work.
I loved the Lundini interview on Spassolini, especially the bit about how the figure of Mussolini can be seen as funny in Rome, while it has a different effect in other parts of Italy. I think it’s difficult to talk about that, it would be easier to merely disqualify the surreal quality of certain humor as non-political. You also talk comedy and politics a lot on Comedy Talk, like in that crazy episode with Paolo Ruffini.
In this historical moment, when we talk so much about political correctness and representation (or maybe we simply start to see people who were normally off the stage) their very presence is political. And choosing not to take sides can also be political. I don’t think everybody should, but either you choose complete abstraction and decide not to talk about the contemporary, or if you do represent society a message will come across. If you always drop the f-word you might not be homophobic, but you are upholding that language in some kind of way. I am very interested in these dynamics.
Which brings us to punching up, punching down, and the whole satire thing.
Going back to recent Italian history, I think in Italy the word satire has been abused in the past, because it was so easy to make fun of politicians (especially under Berlusconi). Now it’s very hard to do it, because politicians themselves are using a comedic language. This is also the issue with political correctness: I don’t think we would talk about it so much if political incorrectness was limited to comedy. Unfortunately, it’s not like that. Also, as Francesco De Carlo says, we cannot really complain about it because it never existed in Italy.
Giorgio Montanini, one of the pioneers of Italian stand-up comedy, talks satire and TV on a panel with Paolo Ruffini, who defends the value of traditional cabaret.
That’s true! Last question. What do you think about the increasing globalization of comedy that’s happening through Netflix and social media?
A big thing about Netflix is you can watch specials by French, Indian, German comedians. I think that’s really cool, although of course you won’t laugh at everything, but it’s good to see the formula work across cultures. When I visited by brother, who lives in Poland, I found lots of stand-up on Netflix. They were making lots of jokes about religion - from a believer’s perspective, though, not like Ricky Gervais. I think broadening your perspective on the world through this increasingly international language is a very good thing. As for social media, it’s been weird seeing all these comedians reinventing themselves with Zoom shows, podcasts, and whatnot. It’s good to see how people are coping with this global emergency the best they can.