The Playful Spirit: Italian Humor

Copyright 2012 by Paul H. Altrocchi.

Author Credits: PAUL H. ALTROCCHI

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ISBN: 978-1-4697-8474-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4697-8473-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4697-8475-5 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012903396

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 03/02/2012

CONTENTS

2012 Introduction

1951 Introduction

by Rudolph Altrocchi

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Proper Names Mentioned

O, for the love of laughter…

—Edward de Vere

(aka William Shakespeare)

—All’s Well That Ends Well III, vi, 35

Dedicated

To two men who have

shared my laughter

since they were born—

my two sons:

John Cooley Altrocchi

Paul Hemenway Altrocchi

—Rudolph Altrocchi

Rudolph Altrocchi in the 1940s during his tenure as Chairman of the Department of Italian, Berkeley.

2012 Introduction

Rudolph Altrocchi was born in Florence in 1882 of an American citizen father, Giovanni, who was born in New York, and a quadrilingual European mother, Pauline Zamvos, a citizen of Italy. Rudolph learned English as the spoken language at home, Italian by living in Tuscany, and French from the French School he attended in Florence beginning in kindergarten.

Giovanni, a pupil of Donizetti, was one of the most gifted pianists in Europe and taught piano as his profession. Why he suddenly committed suicide with a pistol when Rudolph was seventeen has never been clear to subsequent generations but it certainly threw the family into disarray. Rudolph was sent to a prep school in Zurich for a year where his roommate was George B. Weston of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rudolph then emigrated with his mother to Missouri where he bought and successfully managed a pig farm for four years. He became happily fluent in Pig and was quite convinced that his pigs were able to smile and laugh at his jokes and even his puns.

In the summer of 1903, George Weston, then a senior at Harvard, located him in Missouri, came to visit and told him he was staying until Rudolph agreed to leave his pigs and piglets and go to college. When Rudolph asked, Where would you suggest, George answered, Harvard, of course. You belong there and you would carry on the family tradition of your Uncle, Nicola Altrocchi, class of 1876. After a month of intense hog sessions enhanced by Midwestern beer, Rudolph gave in, applied and was accepted, thus becoming the only trilingual swine farmer in Harvard’s Class of 1908.

Rudolph achieved his Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literature at Harvard in 1914, taught at Pennsylvania and Columbia for four years and then at the University of Chicago for ten years. After one year at Brown, he became Chairman of the Department of Italian at Berkeley in 1928, transforming it into the largest and best Italian Department in the country, retiring in 1949. He retained his love of humor, Harvard, Italian literature and pigs all of his life, not necessarily in that order.

In the fall of 1950 he gave eight Lowell Lectures on Humor In Italian Literature in Boston, four of which his son Paul attended while a junior at Harvard. His son John had graduated from Harvard a few months before. The Lowell Institute is an educational foundation established in 1836 in Boston which has sponsored free public lectures on both erudite and popular interest topics ever since. Some of the most eminent persons in the United States and Europe have given Lowell Lecture and many books have derived from the series.

Rudolph Altrocchi had a lifelong interest in humor and was the finest raconteur in four languages, including Pig, ever encountered by either of his two sons: John, now a retired Professor of Behavioral Sciences at the University of Nevada School of Medicine, and Paul, a retired Neurologist and once a Professor of Neurology at Stanford Medical School. Rudolph also excelled in witty poems, groan-eliciting puns, and outstanding rhyming introductions of attendees at dinner parties and of honored guests at formal meetings, including presidents of universities and ex-Presidents of the United States. Rudolph was President of the Associated Harvard Alumni of the World from 1941 to 1945 and was twice President of the California Writers’ Club.

As an example of his witty poetry, he first wrote the following poem merely to entertain guests at a private dinner party in Berkeley in 1944, dedicating it to black widow spiders.

Insect Wives

I’m told that certain insect wives, as soon

As they’ve enjoyed their buzzing honeymoon,

Not merely fire their hubbies from the hive

Or nest or hole, but eat them up alive.

He never has a chance to criticize her,

For she’ll soon snack him as an appetizer;

He cannot bore for long his wedded kin—

She’ll pack him, with the wedding cake, within.

Her widowhood advanced with every crunch,

She takes her bliss companionate with lunch;

While he, now freed from feminine abuses,

Devotes himself to draw her gastric juices.

No sexy problems fret this wifely bug;

She solves them all with her initial hug.

All wives will welcome such a dainty system

Of shaking mates as soon as they have kissed ’em!

Rudolph Altrocchi taught his sons what all good humorists know:

1. No matter how brilliant or skillful the anecdotalist, poor timing can ruin even the best of stories. Only the storyteller knows the best time for a story or joke. Humor on demand is often unsuccessful. Whenever a relative or friend suggests at a dinner party that the humorist should tell a certain tale or joke, and especially when he/she then tells the assembled group that the story is the funniest you’ve ever heard, said individual should be silently ignored and skipped later in the evening when Frangelico or Amaretto Disaronno are offered to all other guests.

2. Humorists are entertainers, not professional historians committed to precision of every detail. A spouse or other relative who repeatedly interrupts to point out an historical inaccuracy should be patiently instructed, over a period of ten years, in the error of his/her ways. If interruptions continue concerning breeches of historical truth, surgical removal of the tongue (glossectomy) should be considered among other treatment options.

3. It is the humorist’s duty to improve stories over time by changing any aspect of the tale which will make it funnier or more interesting and intriguing. The best storytellers all do this and thus steadily add luster, sparkle and wit to their material.

4. Never give detailed, long-winded sources for your stories. Do not start by saying that you first heard the story from your mother-in-law’s uncle in Atlanta, or was it your second cousin in Charleston, twenty years ago or was it ten? No! Claim the anecdote as your own.

Last night I arrived at Bill and Wanda’s garden party in white Arab garb and suddenly realized that no one else was wearing a costume. Embarrassed, I immediately pulled off the robe, forgetting that… As gifted raconteurs know, this is not lying. It is fiction, as a humorous story should be. Personalizing a tale to make it more entertaining is the very tissue of good story-telling.

The Editors chose the book’s title, The Playful Spirit, because Rudolph Altrocchi so often mentions this trait as the essential ingredient of a true humorist. This innate spirit includes a zest and exuberance which counteracts life’s solemnities and tribulations with a pursuit of joy at every opportunity, including a special ability to spot amusing characteristics and foibles of the human species. A humorist must have the talent to convey these quirks in such a witty manner that it triggers in us a sudden burst of mirth which expresses itself socially as smiles and laughter.

The Editors thank artist Dorothy Norton of Bend, Oregon for creating the cover, and photography specialist Leilani Ng of Honolulu for the internal illustrations. We also thank Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) for allowing us to use his subtle-smiled portrait as our book cover. During the past 500 years, the name Machiavelli or Machiavellian is synonymous with a somewhat cynical philosophy of statecraft and the necessity for a political leader to employ cunning, duplicity and, when necessary, brute force to maintain his power, as described in Machiavelli’s major work, The Prince. Few today are aware that Machiavelli had diverse literary talents and that he wrote the finest theatrical comedy of the 16th Century in Italy, as described in Chapter 5. His ingenuity in the field of wit and hilarity elegantly qualifies him as a Humorist with The Playful Spirit.

Paul Altrocchi, Kaneohe, Hawaii

John Altrocchi, Reno, Nevada

February, 2012

1951 Introduction

by Rudolph Altrocchi

An Italian novelist described a certain French author’s treatise as a yawn divided into eight books. (1) I gave eight Lowell Lectures in 1950… honi soit qui mal y pense!

All lecturers know, though they must gauge their oratory to their listeners, that the average audience wants more to be entertained than instructed. What kind of an audience would I have for these Boston lectures? (2) I guessed that there would be two kinds of cultured people among the attendees: a few colleagues who were entirely familiar with Italian literature, and several people who knew next to nothing about it. Therefore I had to compromise and say some things that were obvious to the first group in order to keep the second group from… those fatal yawns. The subject being immense, I had to cut and amputate brutally to make it fit into eight Procrustean presentations, each sixty minutes long. Each chapter represents one lecture as given with only a minimum of re-sculpting.

When I decided to transform the lectures into chapters, I knew that the techniques of the two genres were quite different. I was advised by a man whom I greatly respect to change my approach as little as possible (3) in order to retain a vestige of the speaker’s personality. Covering such a broad sweep of Italian literary history—more than 600 years, the book will perforce have large omissions.

According to at least one expert, there is no such thing as Humor (4). Was I then devoting so much study to a non-existent subject? Would that make me a non-existentialist? Such are the worries of analyzers of Humor. In their constant frustrations they remind me of professional wine-tasters who, poveri diavoli, are never permitted to swallow a drop of the delectable vintages.

I declare firmly, however, that Humor does exist. Indeed, here is the equivalent of its birth certificate: Joy and sorrow having met in the deep night of a forest, fell in love because they did not know one another and a son was born to them which was Humor. (5) He is quite a big boy now and weighs hundreds of bibliographical pounds, most of which I myself have hefted. Let me present him to you as he appears in Italian literature from my perspective as a professor of such literature for several decades and as one who has been keen on humor and laughter his entire life.

Rudolph Altrocchi

May, 1951

Chapter 1

What Is Humor?

An Italian proverb says: Troppa grazia Sant’Antonio. Too much grace, St. Anthony, or, as we might say: too much of a good thing. Here is the story that goes with it. An extremely fat bishop was getting ready to visit his parishes. He saddled his horse, put his left foot in the stirrup, tried to bounce up on the saddle but couldn’t make it. So he knelt and prayed for help from St. Anthony. When he tried again, he swung over the horse so far that he landed on the other side in the mud, leading him to pronounce his now proverbial words.

Here is another more modern source for the same proverb. There are, in Italy, public lotteries. A person buys five numbers between one and ninety. On Saturdays, five are drawn. Even if a person only gets three of them, he makes a lot of lire. At noon the next Saturday, much to his amazement, a barber got four numbers correct. He was so excited that, without stopping to collect his prize, he rushed home and exultantly announced to his wife their good fortune. He was flabbergasted when she burst into tears. He asked her how on earth she could weep at such happy news, at which she stammered, Mother died this morning. The man lifted his arms to heaven and exclaimed, Troppa grazia Sant’Antonio. Too much of a good thing.

We may return later to the mother-in-law joke, one of the oldest topics on earth for jokes. The only reason why it doesn’t go back to Adam and Eve is, of course, because neither of those happy souls had mothers-in-law.

I told this anecdote merely to excite a little laughter, thereby establishing a merry audience mood as the foundation for subsequent and very serious discussion. For there are two schools of lecturers on Humor: Stephen Leacock was a fat and most jovial fellow. He used to mount the platform with a sunny, giggling countenance and before he had said a word, he had the audience laughing (1). Excellent method if you have the fat or face for it. The other school, to which I belong, is to put on a dreadful scowl while talking of Humor. It is a question of method and… physiognomy! (2)

It is a truism to say that the loftiest of concepts often defy definition, for example infinity, eternity, God, the Holy Trinity, love, art, poetry, beauty, the novel and… humor. A definition is a cage. It is easy to put a canary in a cage, not so easy to cage a dinosaur or flea. Both are hard to catch. As Oscar Wilde said, To define is to limit. It is an obvious statement and if he didn’t say it, I do.

For the sake of clarity and mutual understanding, I feel reluctantly obliged to plunge into the icy pool of explanation (3), and attempt to define Humor and its ramifications. There is an immense bibliography on Humor, much of which I digested profitably and much of which I found very melancholy and too philosophical for my mind. The subject is difficult because it involves ethics, psychology, psychiatry, physiology, zoology and half a dozen other ologies which are all, unfortunately, alien to my corner of scholarship.

To define humor, says one critic, is like trying to pierce a butterfly with a telegraph pole (4). May we not include in Humor all subjects which may cause laughter (5)? Though the song says, Don’t fence me in, I must build some fences around my vast subject. This subject includes another impossible question: what is laughter?

I distinguish three kinds of laughter. First there is natural laughter, or magnified smiling, which manifests itself so abundantly in the young and, I hope, daily in all of us as an outward and apparent, even audible, sign of the joy of living. This category includes the pleasure of human companionship and gratitude upon receiving excellent news or gifts. It is, as Max Eastman says, the universal welcome… an affirmation of hospitality and delight (6).

Some of us remember how thrilling it was when our baby smiled for the first time, for no reason except joy, affection and, I might add, normal health. As my dear old friend and teacher, Professor Grandgent, said, "Children laugh for the