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

more. The butcher adds that he gets his beef from the black-market. Güero Corrales tries
to justify how these underhand practices help keep society afloat:
226
Güero Corrales: Es filosofía pura. Acá la dama fayuquera, con todo
respeto, le compra carne al técnico en bueyes y se le desorganiza la
panza, y luego va con el doctor, y el doctor en lugar de darle carbonato la
opera. Pero luego ¡ah! se le descompone el carro al doctor y va aquí con
mi compadre, y resulta que mi compadre se lo tranza, pero luego a mi
compadre se le descompone la tele y tiene que caer aquí con el ingeniero
electrónico y este se lo abrocha…
Sergeant Major: ¿Usted en qué equipo juega?
Güero Corrales: Ah, yo tengo una funeraria ¡y ahí los espero a todos! 189
The abuse is very explicit, and humour helps to ‘expand social knowledge’ 190 by
developing this social truth. We recognise that even when the facts belong to a mise-en-
scene, they refer to our reality, and ‘sonreímos porque nos sentimos tristes de haber
descubierto, aunque solo por un momento, la verdad. Pero en ese momento nos hemos
hecho demasiado sabios para creerla’. 191 We were smart enough to know that the scene
belongs to a fictional world, even if it does refer to a reality we know. Helped by
humour, an uncomfortable truth was revealed. By facing up to it we understand more
about our social reality. True humour ‘tells us something about who we are and the sort
of place we live in, and perhaps indicates to us how it might be challenged’. 192
As we have seen, humour relaxed us, liberated us, saddened us, and finally
called our attention to what is wrong in society. Eco states that humour does not offer us
freedom. 193 Benton warns us that jokes ‘are moral victories, not material ones’. 194 Yet
189 Alcoriza, Mecánica Nacional, 1971.
190 McGhee, Humor. Its Origin… p. 43.
191 Eco, ‘Los marcos de…’, p. 20.
192 Critchley, On Humour, p. 11.
193 Eco, ‘Los marcos de…’, p. 19.
194 Benton, ‘The origins of…’, p. 41.