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

world and change the situation in which we find ourselves’. 122 But what helps us to
understand that this corruption is part of the universe of humour? As we saw before, this
act has been inserted in a humorous text: the whole film. We have also shown that, by
opening the semantic unit to more than a single dialogue or a scene, the audience relates
difficult situations (corruption) to funny ones (the displaced old man in the photograph).
At the end of the scene the assistant says that the flower boxes have collapsed. The fact
that Reginaldo celebrates that the flower boxes are already broken is an unexpected as
well as an unreasonable answer, showing elements of incongruent humour. But
Reginaldo’s answer is also an act of true humour: taxpayers’ money was used to pay the
same contractors over and over, and to coat this truth with humour helps us to admit
reality without feeling sorrow, 123 at least while the enjoyment lasts. 124
On a lower administrative rank, but still with power, are civil servants. In Tívoli,
when the performers go to the Mayor’s office to complain about the closure of the
theatre, they are received by a bureaucrat whose job consists of directing cases to the
Mayor according to their relevance. They are in a waiting room with people whose
appearance is more modest than the artists, and nobody attends to them even though
they have apparently been waiting for a long time. The bureaucrat is contemptuous of
those who have come to discuss their problems, and he is also contemptuous of his
secretary, revealing his sense of superiority to all of them. But when engineer
Reginaldo arrives, the bureaucrat immediately changes his attitude and he acts servile
and attentive. His rude behaviour is unacceptable but humour softens the scene.
Another man is discussing his problem with the bureaucrat, who tells him to
wait for a minute. The bureaucrat opens his desk drawer and, instead of searching for
documents or other information to deal with the case, he reads a comic book. Our
122 Critchley, On Humour, p. 18.
123 Freud, El chiste y su relación… p. 207, 240.
124 Eco, ‘Los marcos de…’, p. 20.
203