La casa del ridere - Versione inglese

The House of Laughter (Panel 1)
At the origins of Jewish Humour
Pomponesco, Mantua, Modena (1891-1918)

Welcome in the House of Laughter. Put yourselves at ease, forget disappointments, and pains caused by conflicts. You’re here to spend an hour of carefreeness. A few warnings, before entering.
If you’ve come here to see Woody Allen, Jerry Lewis, Borat, or Mrs. Meysel, you came to the wrong exhibition. This is not an exhibition about Jewish Humour or about Witz. Here, you’re not going to find portraits of Danny Kaye or of the Marx brothers, nor will you listen to Klezmer music or Yiddish stories in the background.
This is also not an exhibition on Angelo Fortunato Formiggini. In the past few years, we have seen some beautiful ones. Not as know is the work of those that came before. Few know that many of the architects of the House of Laughter were Jews. Humour made their journey towards freedom more pleasant.
Our story develops on small, minimal, and rustic land on two bordering Po Valley states, on the tip of the province of Mantua: between Pomponesco and Poggio Rusco, to then extend towards Modena and Bologna. An enlightened ruler had reigned on the lands between the bends of the River Po and the modest curves of the Apennines: the humourist King, Alberto Cantoni. Under his reign, Tullo Massarani, starting from the biblical story, reconstructed about two millennia of history of the art of laughing.
Formiggini had dreamed of founding a museum hosting the memorabilia, the cartoons, the manufacts of the soldiers in the trenches. No one listened to him, so he focused on a house of paper, the series Classici del Ridere (Classics of Laughter). We hope that a real House of Laughter might one day open its doors to give tranquillity and hope to our restless and frightened souls.

Places & Timeline (Panel 2)
From Pompo to Rome

The Geography of Laughter starts from Poggio Rusco in a stately courtyard, where Massarani takes his first steps, and from Pomponesco (abbreviated in Pompo by Cantoni). A place that is familiar to us for other reasons. It’s in the square of Pomponesco that the remake of the 1952 movie adapted from the book by Giuseppe Guareschi on Don Camillo and Peppone was filmed. In the popular city café, the Monella of Tinto Brass dances wildly. From Pompo, we continue towards Palazzo Te, where Cantoni sets Israele italiano (Italian Israel). The Fossalta, near Modena, follows, in the place where the battle of 1249 took place. Because of a stolen bucket, the people of Modena and Bologna had slaughtered each other for centuries. A convivial party, a preamble to what will happen after 25 July 1943 with the anti-fascist pastasciutta in Casa Cervi.
From Modena, we go to Bologna, where Formiggini graduates. Then Rome, an house that overlooks the Tarpeian Rock. “Umbelicus mundi”. Formiggini wanted to use this title for his humour magazine. Instead, “L’Italia che scrive” (Italy that writes), a book information periodical, is born in 1918. Almost all the collaborators are Jews from the territories of the Gonzaga or the Este (Ludovico Limentani). In Rome, Formiggini crowns the last ruler, Luigi Pirandello, whose essay L’umorismo (Humourism) is born as an introduction to L’illustrissimo (The Most Illustrious), Alberto Cantoni’s posthumous masterpiece. Rome is a parenthesis. The navel of the Jewish-Modenese-Bolognese comedian remains the original one, with its noble caves, the bends of the River Po, the Hall of the Giants, the small-town shenanigans. A story that, thanks to Pirandello, will become European. In the land of the dairy farms and of the pigs forbidden by Moses, Bergson and Freud do not take root.

Map

(From left to right)
Massarani Palace, XX Settembre Street

Ducal Palace, Study of Isabella D'Este

In the square of Poggio in the Corte Piccola of Massarani

“Collecting the murky waters of the Enza from the opposite bank, the Po suddenly flows northwards.”
“The regal river bids a sudden farewell to the chain of the Alps from whence it came” before “heading straight for the sea.” (A. Cantoni, L’Illustrissimo)

Hall of the Giants, Palazzo Te,
“The Giants: that is to say, the first materialists, immediately struck down by Jupiter as an exemplary warning to their later descendants.” (A. Cantoni, Israele italiano)

Monument to the Martyrs of Belfiore
“The people of Mantua know how to wait. Just think how many centuries passed before they had a statue of their poet that was worthy of him and his city.” The martyrs of Belfiore instead of Petrarca (A. Cantoni)

Mutino-Bononiense festival at Fossalta.
“Seven centuries ago, the people of Bologna and Modena used to mock each other and perhaps did not think that the day would come when they could laugh together”.

Bologna, Angelo Fortunato Formiggini. Liceo Galvani, 1896. The divine farce.
In the classrooms of the Regio Liceo, a brilliant student composes a parody of Dante's Inferno, in which professors, students, janitor, and headmaster are included as a joke.
University of Bologna, Carducci lecture hall
'When I was enrolled in my first law course at the Royal University of Bologna, I attended Carducci's school, which was always very crowded. Sometimes a certain individual would attend the lectures, I believe he was a law student, who had the peculiar habit of laughing, shall we say, backwards, that is, when he laughed, he did not exhale, but inhaled, and emitted such a strange and laughable sound that it seemed like immense enjoyment." (A.F. Formiggini, Filosofia del ridere)

Villa Formiggini

Monument to Alessandro Tassoni

The Via Aemilia
One of my farmers, a good chap, strong and skilled worker but with an inexpressibly primitive and simple mind, was very surprised that some car drivers coming from Bologna along the Via Aemilia asked him where Modena was, just six kilometres before reaching it. And he did not reply: “You see that beautiful tower at the end of the road, gentlemen? That's the tower of Modena”; instead, he simply replied: “But isn't that the Ghirlandina over there?”, as if to say: “Why ask where Modena is when you can see the Ghirlandina?” And when he told me about his encounter with the drivers, he laughed a lot at their ignorance." (A.F. Formiggini, Filosofia del Ridere)

Time Map

1826
Mantua
Tullo Massarani was born on February 3

1841
Pomponesco
Alberto Cantoni was born on November 16.

1878
Modena
Angelo Fortunato Formiggini was born on June 21.

1891
Un Re Umorista by A. Cantoni is published.
Humour is the art of making intelligent people smile melancholically. When publishing my memoirs, I should put this question and answer as a motto, and then say to the readers: “Let's see if we can make you smile... melancholically”. Wouldn't that be the same as treating them like good people? (Alberto Cantoni, Un Re Umorista)

1899
Humour classico e moderno by A. Cantoni is published.

1900
Le rire. Essai sur la signification du comique by Henri Bergson is published.

1900-1902
Storia e Filosofia dell’arte di ridere by T. Massarani is published.

1903
Geschlecht und Charakter by Otto Weininger is published.

1904
Nel bel paese là by A. Cantoni is published. It contains three critical novellas. One of these is Israele italiano.

1904
A. Cantoni dies in Mantua on April 11.

1905
T. Massarani dies in Milan on August 3.

1905
Der Witz by Sigmund Freud is published.

1905
“La Nuova Antologia” publishes Il fu Mattia Pascal by Luigi Pirandello serially.

1906
L’Illustrissimo by A. Cantoni is published posthumously, with an introduction by L. Pirandello.

1907
A.F. Formiggini graduates with the thesis Philosophy of Laughter.
1908
Mutino-Bononiense festival at Fossalta in honour of Alessandro Tassoni.

1908
The essay L’umorismo by L. Pirandello is published.

1909
The essay L’origine del Comico by Attilio Momigliano is published on the magazine “La cultura filosofica”.

1913
Il Comico by Giulio Augusto Levi is published.

1913
The series Classici del Ridere is inaugurated with the first day of Boccaccio’s Decameron.

1913
An anthology by Carlo Porta is published, curated by A. Momigliano. Both curator and published risk trial for publishing Ninetta del Verzee.

1914
Formiggini publishes La morale della simpatia by Ludovico Limentani.

1916
During the time his publishing house is in Genua, Formiggini plans a humourous magazine that should’ve been titled “Uovo di Colombo”.

1918
Felice Momigliano is the curator of Marienbad by Shalom Alechem for the Classici del Ridere.

1918
“L’Italia che scrive”, a book information periodical, is born. In the first issue, Formiggini unsuccessfully revives the idea of a museum, La Casa del Ridere (The House of Laughter).

1927
Formiggini publishes Antologia apocrifa by Paolo Vita-Finzi.

1938
A.F. Formiggini dies in November in Modena, by throwing himself down from the Ghirlandina tower.

Who’s who, who they are (Panel 3)

One of Formiggini’s inventions was “Chi è”, a version of the English Who’s who. Before we go into the House, we provide a portable Who’s who of its tenants.

Tullo Massarani

Man of letters and politician (Mantua 1826 – Milan 1905). The Corte Piccola in Poggio Rusco was his small ancient world. Together with Giuseppe Finzi (one of the Martyrs of Belfiore), he was part of the committee which was sent to London to reach an agreement with Mazzini. He was in exile from 1848 to 1850. Congressman from 1860 to 1869, he’ll be the first Jew appointed Senator by the King of Italy (1876). He always dealt with figurative arts and was a painter himself. He proposed rules in defense of the rights of the press, for the protection of artistic heritage, and for civil rights (he was a convinced cremationist). Between 1873 and 1875, he published Studii di letteratura e d’arte e Studii di politica e storia in Florence. He was involved in architecture schools, child labor, and work accidents.

Alberto Cantoni

Born November 16, 1841 in Pomponesco (Mantua). His sister Amalia married Leone Orvieto and was the mother of Angiolo and Adolfo, founders of the magazine “Il Marzocco”. In 1887, he prints the short stories collection Il demonio dello stile (The devil of style). It’s followed by the novel Un Re umorista (A humourist King) (1891). Among our three protagonists, he’s the one most attached to Judaism: “Rav Marco Montara had a comprehensive understanding of Oriental languages… and he left, as per his will, a huge volume titled Il Pensiero Israelitico (The Israelite Thought). I owned it, but I confess I didn’t read it, because, in matters of religion, believing is enough for me” (28.10.1899). He was not insensitive to changes in Jewish history: “What do you say about the Kingdom of Sion? As soon as they appoint me as the official historiographer (not humorous, and since they think I'm capable of it), I’ll go”, he was writing in Villari on 22.09.97. For a long time, he worked on a novel, L’illustrissimo, which came out posthumously, curated by and with an essay by Luigi Pirandello. He died in Mantua on April 11, 1904.

Luigi Antonio Villari

Shy humourists need a sidekick too: “I’d like to have ideas, a thousand times those that I have, and I’d send them forward in battalions, but when it comes to my person, there is no one who is more reluctant than me”. Cantoni found a sidekick in this Neapolitan writer that lived between 1866 and 1923, a scholar of stories and legends about his city, author of a small jewel: Il viaggio di due asini (The journey of two donkeys) (1888). Villari was a descendent of that doctor that, at the fall of the Neapolitan Republic (1799), certified Sanfelice’s pregnancy to the infamous Speciale, the Inquisitor, to save her from the gallows: “Your great-grandfather was reckless, rather than gracious. According to the Bible, if I take an eye from you, it was the Judge (Shophet) who could get one taken from me, not you. The different is great.” Instead, when someone says “Who’s not with me, is against me”, he continues, “it’s because he doesn't wait for them to take his eye out to fight”. Cantoni was never shy with Villari. Their correspondence is a Precious source.

Angelo Fortunato Formiggini

He was born in Collegara, near Modena, on June 21, 1878. He married Emilia Santamaria, a scholar of Pedagogy and School History, in 1906. Later, he moved to Bologna, where he graduated in Philosophy on June 28, 1907, with G. Tarozzi as his advisor. His thesis was on the Philosophy of Laughter. In his first years of activity, he also created two series that would characterize his editorial production: the “Profili” (Profiles), in which 189 titles appeared between 1909 and 1938, and the “Classici del Ridere” (Classics of Laughter), with 105 titles between 1913 and 1938. He engaged in initiatives aimed at spreading book culture, with a particular inclination towards the in-depth study of religious thought through a third series: “Le Apologie” (The Apologies). He established the Leonard Foundation, an enterprise that would bring a Great Italian Encyclopaedia to life (1922). The then-Minister of Education, Giovanni Gentile, embezzled it from him to create the Treccani Encyclopaedia. Facing racial laws, on 29 November 1938, he climbed the tower of Modena Cathedral, the Ghirlandina, and leaped.
Attilio e Felice Momigliano, Giulio augusto Levi

All three coming from Piedmont, the first two were cousins. They were guests in the House of Laugher for fleeting stays. They were high school professors. Before entering University, they roamed the peninsula. Formiggini called them his “wandering Jews”. He gathered them together to dismantle the theory of an atavistic Semitic pessimism. Attilio Momigliano (1883-1952) had written an essay on the origin of comedy. For the series that Formiggini told him he wanted to create, Attilio Momigliano suggested “Classici Giocondi” (Playful Classics). The relationship with Felice Momigliano (1866-1924) became more conflictual after a controversial preface to Shalom Alechem's Marienbad was included in 1918: “Despite all his goodwill, my friend Formiggini will never find in the Jewish world of the past the uncontainable Homeric laughter or the boisterous cheerfulness typical of young peoples”. “A good-natured mamzer”. That’s how Felice Momigliano described the publisher. Giulio Augusto Levi (1879–1951) was entrusted with the task of writing a monograph, Il comico (The Comedian, 1913). This text was the first to mention Freud's works on the motto of wit.

H like Hope
F like Fear (Panel 4)

Pomponesco, Sabbioneta, and Viadana are towns in the Mantua area. Their Jewish communities were very lively in the nineteenth century. Traces of it can be seen in The Garden of the Finzi-Cortini, in the heated dialogue between father and son, the day when the racial campaign erupts, when Bassani recalls two elderly ladies, Saralvo and Rietti, who died in the hospice in Via Vittoria in Ferrara.

It was a malarial area, and flooding of the River Po was (and still is) frequent. Massarani found himself coordinating the relief efforts:

“The disaster that has befallen the great Po Valley is immense, transforming the most flourishing crops into the most desolate marshlands for a long season. Entire populations of hard-working and well-off farmers are now nothing more than nomadic and starving hordes; The granaries that remain standing are easier to count than the ruins.” (T. Massarani, Ricordi cittadini e patriottici, 1879).

“Now there are also numerous pigs surrounding them – almost a thousand – due to the large expansion of the dairy industry. Blesses be Moses, who forbad them. In fact, our farmers have one per family, and we have none. […] The dairies keep a large number of pigs each with the milk waste. You keep becoming increasingly more… witty and increasingly less a humourist. You tend towards the lepid, and never towards the smile that is pain” (Cantoni to Villari, November 8, 1901).

For Cantoni, as for Massarani (Formiggini was younger), it would be better to talk about Newborns with freedom. The memory of the abuse suffered could not be erased: “In Palermo, I saw with my own eyes a junk shop with mannequins standing upright and dressed in second-hand clothes. It was literally called Al negozio all'uso ebreo (The Shop in Jewish style)” (Cantoni to Villari, November 24, 1903).

Humourism was a comfortable companion in the slow journey towards freedom. Cantoni was fascinated by the wisdom of a Renaissance woman, Isabella d’Este, whose motto Nec spe, nec metu became his own. Growing up free, without being deceived by hope, but not remaining prisoners of fear. Floods are like racial hatred, which sometimes returns. We must know how to build solid embankments

Portraits (Panel 5)

Cantoni’s proverbial reserve stemmed from his character, but also from a peculiar condition shared by the Gonzaga-mutino-bononiensi humorists. The rejections of pictures and thus of self-portraits:

“According to our elders, pictures easily led to idolatry […] Uncle Moisé has been dead for a quarter of a century, and we have never owned a portrait of his. Even then it was less in use, and it’s also quite possible that he never had a portrait done, like all the ancient religious Jews. Actually, Mortara had one done, but Mortara was a father modernized religious man. -The ancients were cautious about portraying themselves, so as not to encourage, even profanely, the habit and practice of images” (Cantoni a Villari, 19.10.1903).

We would therefore be disrespectful to Cantoni if we reproduced, in its actual size, the splendid portrait preserved in the Angiolo Orvieto archive at the Gabinetto Vieusseux. We reproduce in scale, from small to large, in an attempt to visually demonstrate how the fear of falling into idolatry is transformed by the appearance of photography first, then by Formigginian caricature: L’uomo con la pipa (The man with a pipe), ink on paper, by Guglielmo Wohlgemuth. The project of an ex libris for the Casa del Ridere.

Pour ce que le rire est le propre de l’homme

“Laughter is a prerogative of the human being” (Rabelais).

Animals don’t laugh. The dog doesn’t laugh; it wags its tail. Pascoli’s dedication of his Primi poemetti (1897) to his sister Maria sets a precedent:
“The dog wags its tail because it doesn't have a hat to take off.”

Nineteenth-century Physiology had strived to explain why a newborn starts to smile at the end of the second month of life and laughs from the third month onwards. A modification of the act of suckling? With mischief, laughter becomes the result of conscious disobedience. Mantegazza’s work Fisionomia e mimica (1881) sets a precedent. So do the grotesques actualised by Cantoni, the statuettes from the Tanagra collection at the Louvre, which Formiggini went to visit whenever he could.

It’s never laugh through gritted teeth. The stronger the laughter, the more breathing will be affected, to the point of bordering on suffocation. Ariosto understood this when he described Fiammetta's uncontrollable laughter, as she falls backwards in bed because she can “barely breathe”. Laughter is as contagious as yawning, but it is the opposite of it.

From the notebook with the notes for Formiggini’s thesis:
“Biblical humourism. Drawing humour from the Bible, even though there is very little to be found. Grotesque scene of a drunk Abraham Gen. IX. 21. Abraham, Sarah, and Pharoah Gen. XII, 15. Abraham and Sarah XXI. 6 Gen. Isaac and Rebecca XXVI. 7 Gen. In the episode of Sarah and Hagar: the first one doesn’t make a very good impression: G. XVI. Abraham laughs raucously: Gen. XVII. 17 Sarah as well: Gen. XVIII. 11.12 (13.14)”

The Alphabet of Laughter (Panel 6)

The Alphabet of laughter is not included between A and Z, but between H and X. To understand the language spoken by the inhabitants of the House, one must be familiar with the dialect and the different alphabet that makes the laughable workable.

In 1899, Cantoni publishes Humour classico e moderno. Classic humour, “a nice, ruddy-faced, jovial old man”, and modern humour, “a thin, cautious little man”, start a dialogue. They meet in Bergamo in front of the monument of Donizetti. In the city of laughter, monuments are inspired by humourists.

Whether classic or modern, humour has become the H since that day: “Among the Italian contemporary artists there are many and not few still loyal to the H.”

Cantoni loved mixing letters. Nato con libertà (Born with freedom) is the anagram he chooses for himself. For his characters, the game of nicknames is endless.

Gualtieri called Piangi (Cry), thus the inevitable joke:

“And Cry to laughter! Poor man. He had cried a lot during his life, and now he found himself having to laugh out of obedience”.

Anagrams, nicknames, popular proverbs:

“O che o lè/ Son sempar me. Either here or there, it’s always me. It really is difficult to fit in more in eight syllables. Thus, may those who spend so many words and so much paper on modernly determining, by cleverly twisting it, the ancient and crystal-clear separation between what is within us and what is outside us, learn them by heart” (A. Cantoni, L’illustrissimo).

Pirandello derived the poetics of doubling from Cantoni’s H. The famous “two-faced herma”:

“I once saw Pierrot standing solemnly on one side and laughing hysterically on the other. I'm worse, now. I look serious on the outside, but I'm laughing inside. But I laugh badly.” (A. Cantoni, Humour classico e moderno).

X, or, better, Ics. Formiggini also loved to abbreviate, invent words, humanise animals and the Ghirlandina and Asinelli towers that embrace each other on the day peace is achieved in Fossalta.

«L’Italia Che Scrive» (Italy that writes), the magazine founded in Rome in 1918, becomes X or Ics.

With the lowercase x, he signs his articles. The lowercase x will appear will appear at the bottom of the will left to his wife in order to save his company from the crisis of 1938 and establish the ICS Limited Company. Extreme, desperate example of Formiggini’s irony. The unknown x in place of his own name.

H like Heine
R like Renan (Panel 7)

Among Massarani’s merits there is also the first discovery of Heinrich Heine. In a series of articles for the magazine “Crepuscolo” by Carlo Tenca (1857) he presents for the first time in Italy the author of the Rabbi of Bachenach, a classic text of Central-European Jewish Humour. Heine, the “modern humorist,” is discussed in the biblical chapter of The History and Physiology of the Art of Laughter.

“Pessimism is the chronic state of the Jewish people”, Guglielmo Ferrero wrote in his book L’Europa giovane (Young Europe) (1897), which went to become a bestseller. Heine’s “Humouristic” pessimism, Massarani replies, arises from a “conscience of the value of life”.

For the Newborns of freedom, Heine has a brother: Ernest Renan. A model of optimistic-pessimism the first, a model of sobriety the second. To those who asked him for support for the project that would later prove successful for the construction of the great Synagogue of Rome, Massarani wrote on 9 February 1893:

“A sense of composure, of recollection, of faithful but truly domestic tradition, it seems to me, should characterize, in Europe, the sanctuary of those extreme pilgrims of work and thought that the Jews were and are. I remember that in Toledo I saw a church that was nothing other than a synagogue of the thirteenth-century; it’s preserved almost intact with its cedar coffering, with its geometric perforated matroneums, with its Jewish legends intertwined with the gorgeous ornamental foliage, a spontaneous and almost native mix of Gothic and Arabic, which seems to reflect the two currents, eastern and western, which mixed in the lineage that gave Spain so many eminent men, among them Maimonides, a Renan of his times.”

R like Riddle

Biblical humourism, for Massarani, nests in riddles. The Queen of Saba, the enigma of the lion, which “good-hearted Samson offered his guests on the very day of the wedding feast” (Judges, 14, 12-20). Freud will also see in riddles a variation of witticism. Massarni gives his own amusing version:

“Remembering a certain skull of a lion he had killed, in which bees were now swarming, [Samson] asked who was the eater from where the food came out, the strong one from where the sweetness came out. And certainly those lazy Philistines, even if they had had seven days to guess, would never have figured it out, if it hadn't been for their cunning fellow villager, the bride: who asked them: ‘What is sweeter than honey? – they replied – and what is stronger than a lion?’ But he was not such a slow-witted hero as to fail to understand his wife's taunt, and replied: ‘If you hadn't ploughed with my heifer, you wouldn't have guessed.’ But he did not realise, poor man, that just as the sad woman had betrayed his pride as a host, so she would betray him in his vigour and honour, betraying him to the point of ignominy and death.”

Massarani was intrigued by enigmatic choices. His most famous painting, The Baths of Alexandria Heated with Books, was inspired by the dilemma faced by Caliph Umar, who was falsely accused of destroying the Library of Alexandria. If the books were contrary to the Koran, they were harmful and therefore had to be burned. If, on the other hand, they were in accordance with the Koran, they were useless and therefore still had to be burned.

A like April’s Fools (Panel 8)

The mix of Gothic and Arabic in Spanish synagogues, liked by Massarani, anticipates Formiggini’s social and universal laughter. The protagonists of the H and the Ics always search for common denominators, they are obsessed by impossible analogies. They fight for the demolitions of walls: “We gave you a God and you resented it”, Cantoni complains to Villari (5.1.1896).

In the praise of the "virtuous and housewife" woman that we read in Proverbs (“She wakes up when it’s still night, and gives food to her family…” 31,15), Massarani sees a likeness with the “Homeric Penelope”. Cantoni boasted of having anticipated with the will of his Re umorista the conclusions of the Parliament of Religions, gathered between 11 and 27 September 1893 in Chicago, on the occasion of the Universal Exhibition:

“If Domeneddio (God) refuses to listen to us, it certainly won't be because we pray to him in too many languages, or because some approach him barefoot and others bareheaded. The difference is just that, or only slightly greater, but the evil is everywhere and far greater.”

In the same years, Graziadio Isaia Ascoli elaborates his theory of the common origin of the two races (Aryans and Semites), which modern linguistics will later prove to be unfounded. A common origin between the indo-germanic languages and semitic languages doesn’t exist, but the goal was the same of Formiggini’s graduate thesis in Law, which makes a mocking use of it in its title:

“Women in the Torah in comparison with the Mânava-Dharma-Sâstra. A Historical-Juridical Contribution to a rapprochement between the Aryan and Semitic Races.”

“When I graduated in Law in Modena, I played a magnificent April Fool's joke on the professors by inventing a certain thesis on Aryan and Semitic law that earned me full marks and honours, without anyone having dared to open it”
(Ficozza filosofica del fascismo, 1923).

“I didn’t speak to him out of shyness” (Panel 9)

Cantoni loved to be left in the shadows. A writer who loved to see without being seen. Two true events, two missed meetings: with the (laic) pope Benedetto Croce, and with the future (real) pope Pious X. It should be remembered that Croce dedicated a profile to Cantoni in the series La letteratura della Nuova Italia (1915).

“I stayed in Perugia for a change of air. […] There I saw (tantum vidi, like Ovid says), your fellow citizen and colleague Mr. Benedetto Croce. I ate in front of him many times, and his beautiful wife was also there…” (Cantoni to Villari, 8.10.1899).

“I repeat, his wife, because, being at the café, I heard that he has been with her for six or seven years and that he married her. – She is a little lively and cheerful in her manners but in essence they say she is a good wife…” If I meet you as I met Mr. Croce, that is to say six metres away, with a large table laid but empty of people in between, it will not be so bad…” (Cantoni to Villari, 16.10.1899).

“I like Pious X too. I travelled together with him (when he was Bishop in Mantua) in a carriage of the tram that was going to Castiglione delle Stiviere. – I didn’t speak to him out of shyness, but I could have very well done it, even without being as daring as you are.
For nine years, he was a parish priest in Salzano, where my uncle used to spend the six months a year of vacation with his family. This uncle of mine (my grandmother’s brother) was very religious in the Jewish way, but he got along very well with the parish priest, very religious in the Nazarene way. As proof you can take that the parish priest would go every night to play cards with my uncle and his women (wife and daughters). – I spent a lot of time at the villa as a child, and I saw Sarto (t/n Pious X)'s predecessor, who had the same habit, playing. In fact, when I found myself on the tram that day, I, mistaking the dates, believed that the parish priest I had seen playing at my uncle's house was Sarto himself, yet I did not have the courage to come forward. How does one do it! Not everyone can have your nerve, or to put it in Lombardian terms, your tolla. I wish I had some (ideas) to send them forward in battalions, in closed combat, but when it comes to the person, it is impossible to find a man more shy than me. They’ve always thought of me as too risk-taking, but I haven’t had the courage to tell Sarto (there was no one else but one his priests there) that I had liked him for a long time, because I had seen at Uncle Moisé’s house. I was wrong about date and person, but in good faith, and there was nothing implausible about the fact that the parish priest I saw was him. I felt, I don’t know, that that it was a desire to take advantage of Uncle Moisé's posthumous merits in order to gain sympathy for myself, without any merit whatsoever.” (Cantoni to Villari, 14.10.1903).
Israele Italiano (Italian Israel)
In the Hall of the Rebel Giants (Panel 10)

Israele italiano (Italian Israel) is a short story that Cantoni wrote a few years before dying. It’s perhaps the clearest example of dialogue between Judaism and the surrounding world. Two young men in their thirties, one blond, the other a brunet, the sons of two good women, one Christian, the other Jewish, who are close friends, who had raised them together and sent them to school together, meet to discuss about Judaism and Christianity: “They turned one in one way and one the other way towards the two diagonal corners.” They take advantage of “Giulio Romano's acoustic whims” so that they can talk to each other “at a respectful distance”. The short story shows that laughter always needs an echo.

“The guardian of the building – a lovely old lady – with hair styled like Botticelli's models. As she was forbidden from leaving the guests alone, she sat comfortably at the window and began to knit. It had already happened to her once before with two Englishmen, who had kept her there from noon until evening, to satisfy their desire to talk on the ‘wireless telephone’. The two young men pointed at her with gestures, so as not to provoke a long, cavernous rumble from the echo that would wake her with a start, and quickly returned to their positions on the sharp edges of the two opposite corners.”

The brunet man converses with the blond man. Before speaking, he pushes his face “against the corner of the two walls as much as his rather Dantesque nose allows” and says:

“I am not unaware of my ancestry, but you... who are you? How can you prove that you are not a Hun, a Gepid, an Ostrogoth, or a Vandal? It seems that you have never noticed that when you encounter a stupid Jew, the first thing that comes to mind is that he must be stupid for good reason. And why does this come to mind? Because he must have overcome all the barriers that stood in the way of conquering his stupidity.

I cannot stomach the way of thinking of certain exotic brothers of mine, who do not hesitate to love some Jews, taken individually, but who detest the so-called Jewish spirit in a universal sense ‘on principle’. They don’t understand that Jesus Christ was your fellow believer and that human morality still revolves around your Decalogue. How can one forget these things? Jesus Christ, with much of a greater voice than the poet of Mantua, wanted to lead mankind to piety, both of the poor and the woman, but everything essential that contrasts with the old faith either came later or was not his doing.” The guardian, who had let her knitting work fall on her lap, starts to snore “in a cadence, as if she had two violin strings in her throat, one major, one minor, which repeated in competition their slight buzzing.”

“The brunet:

The Jewish spirit has axiomatically become a kind of polyhedron that can find a solid foundation on all its faces. The Inquisition was more honest. They burned us because we weren’t Christian, and celebration! Not like now, because there is everything among us: from gleaners of all kinds down to anarchists of all stripes.

The blond:

You’re restless, or am I wrong?

The brunet:

I am. And I wasn’t. It was the Dreyfus affair that stirred up my feelings.”

The two young men move to the Ducal Palace.

The blond asks the brunet why he decided to stay unmarried. When they were in front of Isabella D'Este's feat (a very strange feat for a Renaissance lady), the brunet man could not resist pointing her out to his friend and replying: “Nec spe nec metu”.

“That’s why. The Dreyfus affair took away many of my hopes and our resistance is taking my fears away, but overall I prefer to stay unmarried. That's what one gets for not wasting time when you encounter times of religious factions, and it can seem like another bad example, but on the contrary it’s nothing other than a disciplinary mortification, destined to cast favourable light on a true and rightful wedding”.

The young men conclude their excursion to Mantua with a ‘pious’ visit to the memorial stone of Andrea Hofer and the tomb of Belfiore: two monuments that remember the hero and martyrs of the same imperialism. Not for nothing had Andrea Hofer fallen so close to Enrico Tazzoli. The love for one's fatherland can take different paths, but it reaches the same height.

Gheloteca (‘Library of Laughter’) (Panel 11)

In Greek, ‘laughter’ is Ghelos.
Gheloteca is thus the heart of the house.
These are the titles Cantoni would’ve chosen for this library.

“Here is my assessment of the greatest humoursits (which I mostly read in my youth). All of Merlin Cocai and almost all Heine. By humourist Dickens only Copperfield (because I didn’t understand Pickwick); by Stern only the travel, in Italian; by Swift, a few chapters of Gulliver; by Thackeray, just a few first pages, because I didn’t like him; by humourist Daudet, just the first book of the Tartarin of Tarascon; by Jean Paul almost nothing because I haven’t enjoyed him; by Rabelais three or four chapters here and there, by Erasmus only In the Praise of Folly in Italian, which I had when I was 15 years old, and I’m searching for it in Latin now as an exercise. By Cervantes absolutely nothing, except the numerous quotes one can so often find, thanks to which I dared to speak about him in Pietro e Paola; I’m trying to read him in Spanish now, but I’m not understanding much more. As for the technicians of the h., none in full, and expressly so, because I wanted as best to speak about them myself. […] My gout has been giving me nothing but insomnia and cough for a while now, but it’s not little. I think Iago often has a touch of humor in Othello, but I don't know Shakespeare's real semi-serious comedies, such as The Taming of the Shrew. Comari as well, only in the reduction for Boito’s music. I read Bini as a young boy and I lost him immediately, without being able to find it again, and then the Buco nel Muro as soon as it was published, and then no more. It must be 30 years or a bit less. This is what happened to me with Nievo’s Ottuagenario. – I’ve searched a lot, but I can’t find anything else of importance apart from Stendhal; little of his as well” (Cantoni to Villari, 20.3.1900).

“Mr. Daniele, my friend, has a bad vice: he laughs in his throat in such an irritating way, which many people, many times, are tempted to slap him. More so that, right after, he approves of what you are telling him. He nods with his head; he approves with hast – Yes, yes! Yes, yes! As if it hadn't been your words that provoked that mischievous laugh just a moment ago. (L. Pirandello, Un goj, in Novelle per un anno, 1922).

In 1893, Pirandello discovered Cantoni by publishing a review of L’altalena delle antipatie (The swing of antipathies) on the “Folletto”. To Cantoni, he dedicated Un critico fantastico (A fantastic critic) (“Nuova Antologia,” March 16, 1905), which was then retaken to preface L’illustrissimo. Formiggini will be the publisher for Liolà (1917).

“I came to the Campidoglio with very serious intentions, because I aspire to immortality. In fact, I’m thinking of founding here a Gheloteca, which would be a sort of Pantheon of Laughter. In which you’d be among the living Italians as a sort of Jupiter. Imagine then if would not gladly serve the Jupiter of my Pantheon.2 (Formiggini to Pirandello, November 9, 1916).
“Alberto Cantoni, our witty humorist, felt deeply the internal conflict between reason and emotion and suffered from not being able to be as naive as his nature would have overwhelmingly wanted him to be” (L. Pirandello, Un critico fantastico).

In the Gheloteca, you come in with special glasses

“Everyone knows, perhaps, the story of that poor country man who, having heard the parish priest say that he could not read because he had left his glasses at home, put his mind to work and came up with the bizarre idea that being able to read depended on having a pair of glasses. And it’s known that the poor man came into the city and entered an eyeglass maker’s shop, asking: - Reading glasses! But, because no pair of glasses could make the poor man read, it’s known at the eyeglass maker, grown impatient, sweaty and puffing, after having destroyed half the shop, asked him: - Do you even know how to read? To which, surprised, the countryman: - Oh that’s a good one. If I knew how to read, would’ve I come here?” (L. Pirandello, Un critico fantastico).

“The humourist has a deforming lens in front of his eyes, or to be more precise a colored glass which we use to be able to tolerate the view of the sun, when, for example, we want to observe and eclipse. The humourist, with his lens, sees bodies and shadows together, the external appearances and the spirit of things; with his colored lens, like we look at the sun, he looks at the truth, and how we can see the sun and the moon at the same time during an eclipse, he sees the serious side and the funny side of things” (A.F. Formiggini, Filosofia del ridere, 1907).

A like Almost (Panel 12)

Riddles, dilemmas. Parodies. That’s a second genre that the House leaves as an inheritance to posterity. Imitation. From Parnassus to Decanting. Burlesque imitation. La divina farsa (The divine farce), the parody of the Divine Comedy created by Formiggini to play a prank on the professors at his Bolognese high school. The vaguely blasphemous parody. One of the illustrations created for the celebration in honor of Tassoni at the Fossalta was a parody of Leonardo’s Last Supper.

Before Alighiero Noschese, before Crozza, came the parodists of the House of Laughter.

Pio bove, un corno, Primo Levi’s parodic verses. He was an expert of playful, but also sacred, imitation. One can parody even a prayer. Massarani liked biblical riddles, but these have no heirs. Jewish parodies are a strong point on twentieth-century literature. L’Antologia apocrifa (The apocryphal anthology), which Paolo Vita-Finzi publishes in 1927, opens the way for Quasi come (Almost like) by Guido Fink and Guido Almansi (1976). Editions reissues, large print runs. A “parasitic” non-fiction, as it would be disdainfully called; but can’t one say the same about literary critique?

Paolo Vita-Finzi (1899-1986), a diplomate, consul in Germany, Tunisia, Sidney, and London, author of Delusioni della libertà (Disappointments of freedom) (1961), collaborator of “Mondo” and “Corriere”. His Antologia apogrifa had an extraordinary fortune: after the Formiggini edition, it will be reprinted many times. Fifty poets and prose writers, politicians and thinkers of the twentieth-century, philosophers and humorists, among them Pirandello. Parodies with a riddle. Of these fifty authors, one is left in the original, and the reader is given the game of distinguishing between the original and the imitation. An old story.

One day Charlie Chaplin introduced himself in incognito as an impersonator of Charlot, was criticised by the audience, who found him vulgar, exaggerated and fake.

No one could have suspected…

Massarani writes the Storia e fisiologia dell’arte di ridere (History and Physiology of the Art of Laughing) (1900-1901) at the end of his life:

“To give some sort of intellectual field to my late years, I have taken on a literary task that will take some time; and, because it is fitting for older people not so much to begin new studies as to draw some benefit from the old ones, I thought of a topic that would enable me to make use of both old and recent readings, which a long life naturally does not lack. Of these readings I could then choose between serious and light-hearted ones; and I preferred the latter, not so much because I already have enough afflictions in reality without having to seek them out in fiction; but rather, because I was and I am sure that serious things nevertheless get inevitably mixed into the light-hearted ones; and these inevitably meet each other in our steps”.

When Massarani publishes his Storia, Cantoni had already published a lot. He’s talked about in the third volume, in a section called Oggidì. Massarani writes after the assassination attempt against Umberto I and ventures the hypothesis that one might recognize the “Augustan profile” in Un Re umorista (A humourist King). In turn, Formiggini uses these three volumes in his thesis, which was discussed two years after Massarani's death. He uses them in his own ways: “As Massarani wrote three huge volumes, a study of Humourism in Modena would be of great interest (Monza, Tassoni among the firsts, Tirelli’s humouristic drawing)”.

Croce dedicates an essay to Massarani, written in the weeks when racial legislation was raging in Italy: “Mssarani was an Israelite, no one then could even vaguely suspect and imagine what we have seen, to our amazement, in our days” (“La Critica”, XXXVI, 1938, pp. 328-336).

Humourism, eroticism, satire…

In the years when the Classici del Ridere (Classics of laughter) series was launched, the Italian translation of Geschlecht und Charakter, a work by Viennese philosopher Otto Weininger, caused a scandal. Published in 1903, it was translated by the brothers Bocca in 1912. The section dedicated to Jews includes a chapter on humour, which attempts to demonstrate that, like women, Jews are only capable of corrosive satire. Devoid of a soul, dominated by matter and sensual impulse, they wouldn’t be able to compete with the Classici del Ridere.
Before the Great War, antisemitism and sexual issues went hand in hand in Florence, within the context of Prezzolini's “Voce” (Voice), which dedicated a special issue (1910) to the theme of eroticism. For Formiggini, defusing pornography and antisemitism are two sides of the same coin. What to do with Boccaccio, how to use laughter to disarm obscenity, how to dismantle the accusation of ‘pansexualism’ levelled even before Freud's theories became widespread?
Attilio Momigliano, curator for the Classici on an anthology by Carlo Porta, which includes Ninetta del Verzee (1913) was reported to the Modena Public Prosecutor's Office, resulting in the threat of legal proceedings against the publisher.