Big announcement this week on letdown comedy: I decided I’ll start doing “series” of articles about a specific theme, instead of infinite tirades with 454 links in them. It’s more manageable for me to write, for you to read, and I get to discuss examples a little better. I will even squeeze in an interview every once in a while, starting next time. In case you haven’t guessed yet, the first “trilogy” is about Italian identity. Read the second part after the links.
Ted Alexandro is someone many of you probably don’t know, but he’s one of my faves. He doesn’t have a particularly quirky persona or style - he’s just a proper, solid, New York stand-up comic. And every once in a while he has a joke worth stealing.
Ash Sarkar keeps talking comedy and politics with UK stand-ups, so I keep linking those conversations because they are super interesting.
Just a final advice to stay sane despite the new(ish) normal. Seems easy enough.
I don’t remember when I first saw that Family Guy scene where Peter grows a mustache and tries to speak gibberish Italian to some deli guy, but I remember liking it. Apart from the fact that I used to associate that cadence to Argentinian Spanish (I guess there’s a lot of Italian immigrants in Argentina, so they picked up the accent?), I thought it was nice to hear what my language sounded like to those who don’t understand it.
Later in my life, seeing how hyped people get about the Italian accent was a bit like that time I watched A Fish Called Wanda (see LC#8): it was a beep on my radar for national stereotypes, confirming the relative good standing of my identity on an international scale. I think comedy is a great frame to look at the way Italian identity is understood abroad, and especially in the pop culture powerhouse that is the American imaginary. Don’t get me wrong: all identities can be discussed in comedic terms, but I think the Italian character sits on the very convenient threshold between derision and privilege. As seen in countless movies (and many other Family Guy sketches), Italians are often depicted as backwards, racist, and sexist, but somehow they are never completely bad.
On a superficial level the proverbial love for food might help, but more realistically I think it is because mediated Italians (and Italian-Americans especially) manage to maintain the proud halo of the self-made immigrant without inconvenient claims to acceptance or respect that would make them really troublesome to the system.
This has not always been the case. There was a time when Italians were depicted like rats, invading the US with knives in their teeth and wearing silly hats that promised mafia, anarchism, and all sorts of societal ills. It was the beginning of the 20th century, and this sort of treatment went on for decades. But while Italians were eventually able to “become white” in the eyes of WASP-dominated America, other minorities didn’t have the same privilege. Still, it seems mediated depictions of Italians in later ages still retain the same narrative, occasionally putting them on the same side as African-Americans or groups of more recent immigration. To be sure, the former immigrant status is not at all incompatible with the conservative connotations of the Italian stereotype described above, but let’s go back to the comedic.
In this scene of Gran Torino, two characters of Italian and Polish descent exchange friendly insults with each other, teaching an Asian kid of Hmong heritage how to act manly in a social setting. In a similar vein as the “America was born on the streets” claim of Scorsese-lore, old European immigrants seem here to have gained their whiteness by enduring a painstaking process of self-stereotyping, identifying with racialized labels that are not charged enough to be off-limits (it goes without saying, the same exchange would not have worked with the N-word) and familiar enough for the system to digest them. Unlike the much more developed Jewish humor (which, for notorious historical reasons, is conceived at one remove from other European identities), Italian self-deprecation is predicated on a different type of self-consciousness. In place of neurotic witticisms, the Italian comedic uses displacement as a vantage point to anticipate derision. There is, of course, some aggressiveness to this.
Apart from the accent, the food, and the immigration background, part of the Italian mythos revolves around the wise guy, the mafioso, and the whole iconography and genealogy of names and quirks that still inspire directors and rappers to this day. This is a symptom of a wider fascination with the criminal that also encompasses other ethnic groups and, ultimately, grants a degree of respect as well. However, I think there is something that makes the Italian criminal funnier. He is always a bit out of place, a bit odd, as if the anachronistic nostalgia for a land he may have never fully lived made him endearing, but he also has somewhat of a sense of humor about himself. It’s not irony, it’s a sense of conscious detachment that comes from the privilege of being part of a shared, parachuted Italian-ness. When in Goodfellas Joe Pesci kills a guy who cannot explain how he is funny, he is obviously channeling the usual trope of the “mad” gangster, a recurring figure we’ve seen in every other mob flick. But I think his frustration also lies in his own failure to gain that full recognition, the tongue-in-cheekness that passes off as wit, which grants the Italian-American gangster much of his charme.
Berlusconi’s iconic cringe moment at the European parliament - his defiant proposal to have a German MEP play the role of a nazi officer in a TV series - is another example of the Italian as comedic. Not so much because the rebuttal comes in the form of a joke, but because there is a whole theater of stereotypes behind it: the expectation that German people have no sense of humor, that they are stuck-up and, yet again, nazis; but also the idea that the Italian (who is proverbially the smartest of all other nationalities, at least in local jokes) will be Italian and will get away with it.
Let’s be clear: all national identities are built on fiction and stereotypes, and all of them can be made to be funny. But I think there is a connection between the prolonged, nostalgic narrative of immigration that maintains the Italian-American aesthetic timeless in its corniness and Italian political leaders playing class clown in Europe. Perhaps it’s just that Europe and Germany are places Italians still very much migrate to, or maybe our small country wants to compensate its small size, like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas.
I am also tempted to say that, possibly, Italian identity is not perceived as such unless it is displaced in some way. That’s why the Neapolitan is the perfect example of the global Italian: a sort of “Italian squared”, a meta-immigrant that is inherently more charming. Gino D’Acampo (a regular figure on British TV) is not funny in a comic sense, he is not especially witty, but his very being Italian amounts to a sort of comedic currency that allows him to get away with certain stuff (sexual innuendos and whatnot).
To conclude, I should probably clarify why I did not discuss Italian comedians so far. There are obviously both Italian-American (the legendary Dom Irrera, for example) and Italian comics working abroad (Francesco De Carlo), but I wanted to focus on the inherent comedic character of Italian identity itself. Ultimately, I find it fascinating because it is contradictory: welcoming and distrustful, proud and self-deprecating, charming and corny. Like all identities, perhaps, a joke.