Meta-Theatrical Comedy: Pirandello’s Existential Humour and the Italian Avant-Garde

Abstract

This article examines modernist meta-theatre as a reconfiguration of classical tragedy. While many critics have rejected modernist aesthetics for emptying out the content of artistic representation, and accounts of modernist comedy frequently focus on its negative (even nihilistic) dimensions, this article argues that Luigi Pirandello’s theory of humour provides an alternative vision of how modernist theatre can transform comedy in a way that aligns with an ethics of compassion. This sets Pirandello apart from more reactionary contemporaries like the teatro grottesco and the Futurists as well as revolutionary contemporaries like Brecht. Pirandello’s compassionate humour is tied to modernist meta-representation, which for him, as for contemporaries like Edward Gordon Craig, is typified in the figure of the marionette; the marionette epitomizes the tragicomic situation of the modern subject. For Pirandello, modernist humour allows the self-aware subject to be decentred in a way that nevertheless maintains the value of the human being and human experience, opening to a shared understanding of suffering and an ethics of compassion.