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

Even though humour can work as a social critique and highlight the existence of the
rule, at the same time it can criticise it. Humour is a freedom movement, but without
promising liberation. Humour attacks the limits but from within. Thus, although humour
gives us relief about the breaking of the rule, the breaking is only temporary, and in the
end we know and accept the existence of a code. According to Eco, it makes us sad
because we have noticed the truth. Afterwards ‘nos sentimos tranquilos y calmados, un
poco enojados, con un matiz de amargura en la mente. El humor es un carnaval frío’. 88
Zupancic made a connection between the code and the universal. A fact which is
portrayed in comedy represents the universal, because ‘comedy produces its own
necessity, universality and substantiality’. 89 Perhaps tragedy and drama are more
universal than comedy, as Eco suggests, because they discuss well known human topics
such as love and death. 90 Comedy speaks to all topics, but reflecting specific contexts
and creating its own universality, and although not everybody will find humour within,
others will generalise it: ‘all the lawyers are…, ‘every Spaniard is…’, etc. It is possible
to make fun of all kinds of situations, characters and facts in the comic narrative: ‘there
is no sacred thing or solidity that comedy could not rock to its foundations’. 91 The risk
is in not finding it funny because it is an attack against the moral system of the viewer,
or because the viewer does not recognise its references due to the fact that the code, the
rule or the topic is not within his or her understanding.
Umberto Eco’s ideas of humour and comedy bear some resemblance to other
authors already studied. But what it is interesting and important to note is the idea
discussed above regarding the comic effect and its liberation, and at the same time, its
power of oppression. When the rule is understood, there is a reinforcement of it, and
88 Eco, ‘Los marcos de…’, p. 20.
89 Zupancic, ‘The “Concrete Universal”, and…’, p. 180.
90 Eco, ‘Los marcos de…’, p. 12.
91 Zupancic, ‘The “Concrete Universal”, and…’, p. 181.
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