Comparative Drama

In The Ingenious Simpleton, Delia Méndez Montesinos analyzes the subversive potential of brief comic theater and popular performance, and documents its persistent ability to resist submission to hierarchical, social stratification. Through comedy, lower and marginalized classes, who often are subjected to a negative self-concept imposed by hegemonic power interested in sustaining itself, find outlets to transgress socially prescribed norms. Méndez Montesinos’s valuable study concerns itself particularly with popular performances that feature a buffoon or comic simpleton, and develops case studies from three geographical [End Page 101] regions (Spain, Mexico, and California) across disparate chronological periods. Ultimately, this study reveals a heritage of subversive comedy in twentieth-century Hispanic popular performance that can be traced to the origins of the comic simpleton figure in sixteenth-century Spain.

The author’s main contention is not that these kinds of politically subversive performances arise only under particular or special social circumstances, but that they can and do exist in a variety of historical, social, and political environments. The subversion of norms through comic performance is a common denominator that reveals a pervasive and enduring tradition across time. Proposing that “theatre can be a powerful tool to provide marginalized groups with a needed sense of solidarity and self-worth” (xi), the book’s brief introduction establishes its central argument by way of the specific historical examples of Lope de Rueda’s pasos as mass entertainment in sixteenth-century Spain, post-Revolutionary Mexican satirical public performance (a tradition the author sees dating to pre-Columbian times), and the Teatro Campesino among the grape-harvesters of California’s San Joaquin Valley in the 1960s.

The book’s first chapter outlines the theoretical parameters of the study, introducing definitions of laughter and comedy in both social and theatrical contexts. Here, Méndez Montesinos provides a brief historical overview of the comic figure of the fool, its relationship to laughter (particularly in the context of the carnivalesque), and its social and theatrical roles, beginning in the early modern period. The author cites Erasmus and Shakespeare as examples of early modern authors who developed the figure of the fool; she might also have discussed equally important Spanish writers, such as Cervantes, or the popular tradition of performed entremeses and teatro breve of early modern Spain in order to provide a firmer foundation for her otherwise sound historical analysis. Méndez Montesinos’s approach to laughter is largely Bakhtinian, although she also includes references to Henri Bergson, Jacques LeGoff, Thomas Hobbes, Sigmund Freud, and others. This relatively schematic overview of the history of theories of laughter summarizes well-known scholarship on the topic and highlights an important connection between the fool’s marginalized perspective and the figure’s ability to express or reveal truths through comic illusion, in keeping with Aritsotle’s conception of eutrapelia.

Throughout this chapter, Méndez Montesinos relies on a distinction between “artificial” and “natural” fools in an early modern context, claiming that the ruling classes allowed social transgression by fools because they considered their mockery to be unintentional, or because they accepted fools as mentally and/or physically “inferior” beings. While this discussion seems overly essentialist at times, it does serve to articulate the importance of the fool’s freedom to speak, and often to speak the truth, which characterizes this stock type from its earliest appearances on the comic stage. Méndez Montesinos then defines various types [End Page 102] of comedy, largely following the six points of Maurice Charney’s “metaphysics” of comedy: 1) the discontinuous, 2) the accidental, 3) the autonomous, 4) the self-conscious, 5) the histrionic, and 6) the ironic. The chapter ends with this list, where this reader would have appreciated a more extensive discussion relating this helpful scheme to the specific contexts to be discussed in the book.

Chapter 2 focuses on Lope de Rueda as the source of the comic progression that ultimately culminates in Cantinflas and the Esquirol of the Teatro Campesino. Méndez Montesinos juxtaposes the rise of the simpleton in sixteenth-century Spanish theater and its twentieth-century reiteration in Mexico, localizing the latter’s sources in the eclogues of Juan del Encina, the social critique of Diego Sánchez de Badajoz, the rustic humor of Lucas Fernández, and the pasos of Lope de Rueda. She analyzes how theatrical fools who question imposed social values in urban contexts (including the sayagués dialect of comic rustics, the miles gloriosus stock figure, and other examples from the period) form a base of comic drama upon which subsequent generations could build. She cites Lope de Rueda as fixing this comic tendency into dramatic form with his pasos, and finds in them a critique of social mores, hierarchical values, and oppressive social orders, blending the didactic tradition of sermons with the entertaining dimension of farcical comedy. The author then continues to catalogue the roles of the literary pícaro and the gracioso of the comedia nueva in these contexts, supporting her insights with reference to foundational scholarship.

In this chapter, and throughout her thought-provoking book, Méndez Montesinos shows how the subversive tendencies in the simpleton’s performance reassert themselves in Mexico, first in the Revista and Carpa sketch shows of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which she discusses in the context of the social turbulence of the Mexican revolution. From the burlesque traditions of the espectáculo carpero emerges Cantinflas (Carlos Bunfil), who carries the simpleton’s social critique into the realm of cinema by mid-century. Stripping the carpero of its harsh vulgarity, Cantinflas softens the traditional pelado to create the more endearing peladito, who appeals to a broader audience while maintaining the bite of social critique. Méndez Montesinos demonstrates how, in films such as Ni sangre ni arena (1941), Cantinflas triumphs comically over educated, privileged, upper-class adversaries. She finds a similar legacy of Revista and Carpa shows later in the twentieth century in the Esquirol of the Teatro Campesino in California. In her third chapter, she delineates further similarities between the twentieth-century objects of her study and their sixteenth-century forbears in their verbal and kinesthetic language strategies. The author finds in Lope de Rueda’s use of malapropisms and epithets, and in the physical slapstick of the commedia dell’arte, the anti-hierarchical models of ironically nonsensical language in Cantinflas. She likewise juxtaposes early modern and contemporary eras with respect to costumes, masks, and other nonverbal signs in the fourth chapter. [End Page 103]

While Méndez Montesinos’s argument is very effective in documenting what she calls a twentieth-century “resurgence” (17) of the subversive simpleton in Mexico and California, further analysis of how these comic forms developed during the 400-year period between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries might have revealed an interesting, sustained progression of comedy rather than a description of a form and its resurgence centuries later. One can envision many ways to flesh out this insightful study: through a more comprehensive analysis of the authors and texts she chooses to analyze, inclusion of other authors/texts of the same periods (Cervantes, performed entremeses, and potentially the comedia nueva), and a stronger theoretical framework inclusive of more recent literary and cultural theories. Additionally, the book contains some typographical and usage errors that might have been corrected during a more careful editorial process. Nevertheless, Méndez Montesinos’s most salient contribution is to establish intriguing parallels and comparisons among geographies and chronologies to reveal comic subversion as a consistent feature of human behavior and public performance that transcends temporal-spatial boundaries. These enlightening comparisons are the highlight of this interesting and well-written book, and they lead the reader to speculate about other contexts, periods, and places in which similar structures and traditions emerge.