Humor in Spain, Part 1: Introduction

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Notes

¹See http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anexo:Las_diez_pel%C3%ADculas_espa%C3%B1olas_m%C3%A1s_taquilleras_de_la_historia (accessed 2 June 2015).

²These are Los otros/The Others (Dir. Alejandro Amenábar, 2001), Lo imposible/The Impossible (Dir. Juan Antonio Bayona, 2012), and La muerte tenía un precio/For a Few Dollars More (Dir. Sergio Leone, 1965), all of which feature major Hollywood stars.

³See http://www.filmsite.org/boxoffice3.html (accessed 5 June 2015).

⁴A critical overview of these approaches is provided by José Antonio Llera (“Poéticas del humor”).

⁵Unamuno's use of humorismo to refer to (a French) irony is not to be confused with the metaphysical humorismo identified by Shaw (“Humorismo and Angustia” 166–67). Unamuno appears to have employed it as a literary term to distinguish it from humor and mal humor rooted in Aristotelian medicine and physiology. See also note 8.

⁶As Rosa María Aradra Sánchez notes, the canon was dominated by classical sources and the Spanish Golden Age (Pozuelo Yvancos and Aradra Sánchez, Teoría del canon y literatura española 211), hence the identification of Quevedo and Cervantes as the major exponents of these two types of humor.

⁷López Ruiz (Un siglo de risas) traces the history of the comic press in Spain between 1901 and 2000 but focuses on the personal biographies of those involved rather than on the content of their work.

⁸The term humorismo here is not used in exactly the same way as it is by Unamuno. While the term denotes the same gentle humor, they connote differently: Gómez de la Serna embraced it because its suffix allowed him to see it as one of the practices of the avant-garde.

⁹A similar blend with a penchant for dark, critical humor is found in other anthologies (25 años de humor español; Aragón Sánchez, Relatos de humor del siglo XX). Cristóbal Serra's choice of title for his collection (Antología de humor negro español) acknowledges that this is not the only humor found in Spain.