Testing the limits of Pirandello's Umorismo: A case study based on Xiaolin Guangji

This chapter attempts to analyse and test the definition of humour as theorised by Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) in his 1908 essay L'Umorismo. In this work, Pirandello defines humour as the feeling of the opposite, an evolved version of what people find merely ridiculous in life and in literature, which leads to inner questioning and introspection. Pirandello mentions a variety of examples with the purpose of describing humour as the product of the artist's reflection on his own work of art, a convoluted process by means of which writers and readers alike feel the opposite of what they are supposed to feel. In order to test the theory's effectiveness, this article proposes to read a selected chapter from the Chinese jestbook Xiaolin Guangji (1791), namely the one titled Guifeng bu (The inner chamber), seen as a continuous narrative. Xiaolin Guangji may have given life to a coherent series of micro-fictions, in which thematic repetition removes the comical effect and instead leaves the reader with the opposite feeling. Pirandello's theory helps to describe how the feeling of the opposite rises without the aid of repetition, given that other factors (incongruity, superiority, and self-deprecation) come into play.