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

eal inspector has arrived, there is a long scene of a fight with fruit, and later, with bags
of coloured dust that people throw at the authorities. Eventually it becomes a battle in
which all the festival-goers participate. These scenes use a simple mechanism to trigger
humour, namely the absurdity of throwing things at each other. 62 However, in both
cases there is more than innocent incongruity – the acts of humour play another role,
such as offending and humiliating someone in power, and criticising the psychedelic
wave, so famous at the time. I will discuss these two examples later in this chapter; the
point here is to show the presence of incongruity as a source of humour and as a way to
indicate to the viewer that what he/she is witnessing is a comedy.
All the characters in Calzonzin Inspector can be labelled as incongruent as well.
Some of their actions are unreasonable, for example, the devout women who believe
that Calzonzin and Chon are angels because they saw them falling from the sky. They
are blinded by religiosity and do not question the human condition of the men. But the
analysis of characters goes beyond the way they behave, and it is important to consider
the way they look and speak, and what they say. Calzonzin’s clothes immediately alert
us to the fact that he is a comic character. He wears a blanket as though it was a poncho,
but it is not only the wearing of the blanket but also the fact that it is an electric blanket,
and he uses the cable as the belt of his clothes. The way he dresses defies logic, which
makes him a comic character. 63 Moreover, the authorities fit the characteristics of comic
actors suggested by Bergson: their movements are exaggerated, they are unsociable
since they abuse ordinary citizens, they are automatons because they act without
62 Known as slapstick, it is the kind of comedy that has ‘tartazos, encontronazos físicos y siempre con una
actividad frenética y dinámica’, Juan Campos, Comedia. Humor y sátira en el cine (Valencia: Editorial
La Máscara, 1997), p. 14.
63 Comic characters abandon social conventions and logic, and we see this clearly in Calzonzin. Henri
Bergson, Laughter. An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred
Rothwell (London: Macmillan and Co., 1921), p. 196.
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