Cry Asterix

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Cry Asterix

Paris, on a rainy November 3d, 2009, the kind of day when it is preferable to sit at the fireside and read Asterix.

One can read and reread Asterix and still have the same feeling of well being. Do you remember the explanation given by Uderzo tot he origin of the bowler hat in “Asterix in Brittany”?

Then we go back to school and our student and we try to understand what we have read. It is a normal process in France. Quite many University degrees have for instance use used the San Antonio myth for the disputation. Why not Asterix?

It has been done by Umberto Eco in “In the name of the Rose”. Five hundred pages devoted to one and one question only:

Did Jesus laugh?

So reading Asterix we laugh. Why?

Do we laugh because we are good humans or do we laugh because we are humans, meaning, bad.

Shall we quote to our students the old sentence:

The difference between men and animals is that only man laughs?

Or shall we go to Mack Sennett who said the ultimate of humor was a Cop being kicked in the back and falling in a pool of mud.

Which is the trick Goscinny is using, the cops being played by the Romans.

In the circus, in the days when Clowns where known all over the world by their name, the huge, the great, the unsurpassed Grock was known off the stage for his fight against depression.

Which humorist can escape the fight against depression?

Pierre Dac tried to escape from life.

Look at the series which have entertained us for decades, look at the Monty Pythons. They take a normal life situation and transform it into something totally absurd, yet possible.

Take Faulty Tower, hilarious, yet this is basically the story of a couple of inn keepers on the verge of a divorce and an immigrant who is humiliated and made fun of. There is not one glimmer of hope in Faulty Tower, yet we laugh.

Take Black Adder, one of the darkest and most depressing of all the TV series. We should cry, we laugh.

Take Laurel and Hardy, obviously the least philosophical and moralistic series, yet we laugh at the miseries endured by two hobos, out of work, probably destitute from a better situation, whatever they do their misery only increases, yet we laugh.

So, did Jesus laugh?

Did Buddha laugh?

Did Vishnu laugh?

Most probably not.

You cannot at the same time love your neighbor and laugh at seeing him slip on a dog faeces and fall flat on his face;

All so called “dark books” or “dark films” are really negligible when it comes to describing the despair of the human conditions. We feel comfortable when sitting with a glass of wine and happy that our condition is so different from the one we are witnessing.

Funny books and films grope for the darkest side of our nature, the desire to overwhelm the other, to be superior, to be safe in our seat while he fall flat on his face.

It is not an absoluter truth.

That Hellzapoppin. That Master piece of all master pieces ever filmed, at the time of the mood for crazy. It is not strange that we seek evasion in craziness exactly at a time when the World was trying to understand the most terrifying of all craziness, WWII?

Even Asterix and the french school of comics, try to come to term with a world where the French way of life which is all imaginary, is threatened by Super Markets, Super Powers, Super Bombs.

One solution is the little brave Asterix who can defy any giant.

The other solution is Gotlib, trying to find in absurdity, the same way as John Cleese did, an answer to the impossibility of humans to accept one another.

Should we laugh?

Yes!

If we afterward send a donation to Save the Dogs Foundation.