Leticia Neria PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

feeling better than someone else, 107 and the other one with the idea of the relationship
between the ego and the super-ego. 108 We will start by showing how a feeling of
superiority was used in the sources to discuss different social and political topics,
understanding superiority as placing oneself above others and finding funny those who
are different and ostensibly inferior. 109
Superiority
The way that the police is criticised in Hermelinda Linda brings us pleasure and relief
when they are represented as the way that society understands, namely, as corrupt. The
police abuses citizens through acts of corruption, such as in an issue in which a woman
visits her son-in-law in jail, trying to deliver a basket of food. The son in law cannot be
visited because he is in the infirmary, so she must leave the basket with the guard. She
asks the policeman not to eat the food, and he replies: ‘Ni siquiera lo probaría... si me da
una “corta”...’. 110 Afterwards the lady pays some money, asking the policeman to
overcome temptation, and he replies: ‘Por cincuenta “locos”, soy capaz de quedarme sin
comer siete días…’ 111 The way in which the characters openly discuss corruption might
be funny because it is unreasonable and distorted. But the policeman’s lack of dignity,
in first asking for money not to eat the food and later mentioning that for that amount of
money, which is very little, he would not eat for a week, is an example of superiority
theory. The reader feels superior both because he/she would not participate in such an
open act of corruption, and also because he/she would not promise to stop eating for
seven days just for money. These actions denigrate the policeman and set the reader
107
Such as Bergson, Critchley, Zupancic, Eco.
108
Such as Freud.
109
Thomas Hobbes mentioned by Simon Critchley, On Humour (London, New York: Routledge), p. 12.
110 Hermelinda Linda, 363, p.20.
111 Ibid., p. 21.
114