Le Rire européen (review)

The professed aim of the conference giving rise to the twenty-three papers published here was to grasp the possible essence of a European laughter by examining a range of themes including English humour, French wit, and the Spanish piropo, along with an appropriately wide selection of evidence (rhymes, cartoons, songs, literature, joke collections). This is drawn from the perhaps over-represented Britain and France, but also Russia (Iain Lauchlan, Jean-Yves Laurichesse), Romania (Margareta Gyurcsik), Belgium (Anne Chamayou), and Scandinavia (Henning Eichberg), and covers themes as widely spaced as ancient ritual (Jean-Louis Olive on Greek myths), Renaissance poetry (Ruggero Campagnoli on Papillon’s verse), humour after the French Revolution (Mike Rapport), and contemporary fiction (for example, Christian Pentzold on Eco, or Alain Badia on Kundera). One might therefore question the full relevance of a section on African culture, however fruitful Alastair Duncan’s investigation of European images of the black, and David Murphy and Aedín Ní Loingsigh’s analysis of African images of the white, not to mention Antoinette Tidjani Alou’s intriguing assessment of the Dark Continent’s humorous response to colonization. Similarly, Siân Reynolds’s updating of Cixous’s theory of the Medusa laugh relies as much on American material as on European. Moreover, we have long known how risky it is to generalize on any zonal characteristics, hence Paul Gifford’s laudable attempt to redefine English humour clashes implicitly with Christian Lagarde’s warning against national typologies: can one even disagree with Chamayou’s initial assertion that Europe proved totally and unanimously uncomprehending of the Islamist reaction against the Danish caricatures of 2005 (p. 10)? Christie Davies (a bibliographical omission as regrettable as is the depressingly frequent intrusion of Bergson) has aptly determined a global theory of ethnic humour that would amply support Chrystelle Burban’s (nonetheless absorbing) examination of French and Spanish bandes dessinées and their all too frequent un-translatability. William Kidd also examines cartoons, though of a political nature, and uses them as a means to re-examine Franco-British cultural and linguistic interchange. By contrast, Pauline Tee Anderson considers clan-based satire of a different type, namely that stimulated by the gender divisions and power relations operating within the workplace. Her method of having students explain the comic sense of British press cartoons on this theme is one fruitfully imitable elsewhere. Nathalie Solomon investigates a more traditional corpus, namely nineteenth-century French fiction, concluding that its mocking of other European stereotypes not only reinforced national morale, but also provided a pretext to recall the past glories of a culture now manifestly under threat. Moving into the twentieth century, Christophe Reig sees the absurdist humour of the Oulipo group as a means of coming to terms with the inhuman tragedies that period had witnessed. Françoise Haffner makes analogous points on Pasolini’s poetic vigour, a quality that can infuse joy into the work of one regularly classed as a ‘cinéaste tragique’. Equally political, though in a different way, is Adeline Cordier’s analysis of two key French chansonniers (Brassens and Bénabar), whom she sees as offering their followers a paradoxical though reassuring mixture of contestation and traditionalism that one might be tempted to regard as typically French. Not immune from typographical errors and misquotations, the collection thus contains a wide assortment of commendably detailed contributions, each one worth reading by a specialist in its particular field.