The rest of us talk about resilience but we’re unable to laugh

I wanted to write an article on federalism. On comedy as a key to reading fascism, on the winch of 1922 football, about how we were when the match was really tough and how we are now for thirty years crying out the fascist menace without anyone leaving us (apart from that), of course, the transfer of the professors By reforming the Renzi School, the dictator we can afford).

Then I went to Villa Giulia, to attend the Luciano Salce exhibition. There until October 27, a few weeks because no Romanian institution has found a place to host it anymore (thanks for left-wingers, thanks: what would we have done without you to observe the culture). If you pass by Rome, go there: I assure you that you have nothing better to do.

The federation came out the year Luciano Salles and Ugo Tognazzi turned 39. They, who did not need to talk about flexibility because it is inherent, were every 22 years: two of them, Adolfo Celli, Vittorio Gassman. Not Tognazzi, but the other three entered the Silvio D’Amico Academy of Performing Arts that same year. Then came the war, which began the parallel lives of Jasman and Salchi: to the one all the riches, to the other nothing (except for the colossal talent, which went on to bring them together).

Enlisted in February 1943, Gassmann was discharged almost immediately. For Salci, it goes like this: on September 8 they took him prisoner, deported him to Bavaria, and removed the golden prosthesis with which his jaw had been replaced, which had been shattered in a boy’s accident. He can no longer chew him, he runs away, they take him back, they put him with the Russian captives, they steal his food, he becomes 35 kilograms, they transport him with the Italians who fatten him by feeding him butter. collected to buy. They released him on April 30, 1945.

It’s a little shameful in the name of the era in which I live, a time when if you have an ingrown toenail spending your life on TV or on Instagram telling about your pain, I’m going back to the line that Salce, in his memoirs, summed up what he went through: “1943-1945: Two Hard Years” (I suspect it belongs in Guccini’s “joke I’d kill” classification).

Crossroads with Gassman will return more than twenty years later, when Salce’s second wife, Diletta D’Andrea, leaves him for Vittorio. His son Emmanuel – who organized the show about his father “because nobody knows anything” – a year and a half passes when their parents divorce. I ask: So you did not have the shock of moving from my father’s house to your stepfather’s house. He answers: No, I had the trauma of the next twenty years I lived with Vittorio (all his father: for the joke he was going to kill him).

“Since I have not been able to notify anyone of this adventure which I have undertaken, I imagine my parents would be very anxious” (letter from Luciano Salles to his grandmother, from the first concentration camp at Modena, September 1943); “I hope that you too are in good health and that you don’t have much to carry in these painful moments” (a few days later, to dad). Think today. Think today. Think today.

Anyway, Salles is back, and the first thing he thinks of – something he’ll think about his whole life – is comedy. Insult anyone in the century when you offend yourself you had to write on a piece of paper, a postage stamp, or a postage. A selection of the offended letters memorized by Luciano and selected by Emmanuel.

“We are a little offended by what you have said about these ladies who feed and protect cats by showing the qualities of kindness, if nothing else. Don’t use that superlative tone of empathy, it is out of place.”

“Dear Dr. Salles, for some time now your satire of Savoy, Umberto and Vittorio Emanuele has become a fashion. Why don’t you go and tease Nene at Fenfani or Moro or Saragat or the Pope? ».

“You pimps of the filthy worm of the Red Vandals stop staining the memory of Gabriel D’Annunzio every week if you care about your health.”

Mr. Lilio Lutazzi. Once hope fails to suspend your duo’s bizarre, ridiculous, and hilarious performance with Salce, which devalues ​​Studio Uno’s show, we’d be grateful if you could explain why you insist on repeating it, unless you want to force the audience to respond with uncivilized demonstrations. onlookers.” I like to think that these onlookers were especially angry at the sketch in which he once told Salis about his imprisonment: a wonderful trip to Austria he didn’t even have to pay for the train.

How were we when we knew how to laugh at tragedies and stumbles? I seem to remember we were that humanity there, the one on a printed sheet in which Sals answered the question “How do you feel at fifty?”

“Very bad. I don’t speak spiritually, for the torment of the soul was worse at seventeen. Indeed, the soul is refreshed, as I can tell it is renewed, and it is the body that does not go away. In the afternoon it is work and not work, fatigue Great gradual. In the middle of the night, while you are in bed, you yawn inappropriately even in the face of a beautiful woman. In the morning, pains from all sides, refusal of the legs to get out of bed, some suicide attempts. “

Today, we no longer only know how to laugh at us but so as not to understand the tones of those who know how to do it, if you write five lines like this, they tell you that you need a psychiatrist’s reward.

Emmanuel Salles tells me that it took him nine years to decide to confront the boxes of wonder left by his father, the diaries in which Fellini, Flaiano and Vignoglio were in F, the love poems of Diletta, rejection letters from publishers for a book by Luciano and Jasman.

I told him: Your father was going to be directing eighteen films at that time. He replied: Meanwhile, he does plays, radio, television, and all of this while he is on the boat most days.

I wanted to write about the feds, but then they seemed to us such a relic, the rest of us alive, that it seemed to me cruel to say look at them, how better they were, those who owned real cocks, and the strength to overcome them.