“The white clown is elegance, grace, harmony, intelligence, lucidity. And now the negative aspect of the matter immediately appears; because, in this way, the white clown becomes Mom , Dad, the Master, the Artist, the Beautiful, in short, ‘what must be done’ It is then that the august who would suffer the fascination of these perfections if they were not displayed with so much rigor. The august who is the child who shits his pants revolts against such perfection; he gets drunk, rolls on the ground and thus animates a perpetual protest…” And Fellini describes the world as being exclusively inhabited by people; clown men: Pasolini is an animal and pedantic white clown, Antonioni a sad and silent august, Picasso a triumphant and uninhibited august who ends up a white clown, Einstein an august dreamer, Visconti a very authoritarian white clown, Freud a white clown, Jung an august, etc. And Fellini adds: “The game is so real that if we have a white clown in front of us, we are tempted to act august, and vice versa.” Yes, if you are a free man and gifted with humor, which is increasingly rare.
For Philippe Val too, who is publishing a book these days entitled Laugh at Éditions de l’Observatoire, the world is divided into two clownish camps which have been playing an interminable sketch since the 1920s, “when Mussolini took power and a young communist intellectual, Antonio Gramsci, stood up to block his way” . Since then, the sketch has continued between the two protagonists. Between the august of communism (which has become what the doxa considers non-reactionary) and the white clowns of reaction. The two camps are fighting for cultural hegemony, which has had its heyday on the left, ostracizing in the process those who, like Romain Gary, too Gaullist, too free, were pushed to the margins. Gary to whom the augusts preferred… Emile Ajar! But “ridicule cannot kill hegemony, precisely because it is, in essence, ridiculous.”
For Val, “this endless sketch which plays out over three generations is that of our Western calamity”, while we know that the autonomy of culture is the only royal road to culture. “Patatras, the communist and fascist 20th century has put its paws back on art, and the augusts and the white clowns are competing for control and exclusivity”, as illustrated by the contemptuous hatred that Fellini inspired in the communists who considered that his work did not take “social reality” sufficiently into account. However, the maestro will have signed the most humanist work there is. He observed men as they really were, using his most unbridled imagination and the most dazzling laughter to paint a reality which constantly eludes the ideologues too busy copying their fixed ideas onto the life that runs away. non-stop.
Val continues her journey into laughter, which is the other name for freedom, in a luminous and profound essay, terribly funny and erudite, which takes us from Charles Trenet to Joan of Arc and Marceline Loridan-Ivens, from Charles de Gaulle and Ernst Lubitsch to Georges Kiejman and Nietzsche, from Blanche Gardin to Youssef the Algerian friend turned Islamist who lost his humor in the growth of his beard. These laughters from the day before yesterday to today reassure us as they galvanize us. Because Philippe Val is not a moralizer but an acrobat, the chapters of Laugh a series of antics and somersaults, pranks and tears: “My expertise on laughter, its effect, its practice, comes from a solid knowledge of anguish and melancholy.” We suddenly understand why Philippe Val is still so deeply attached to Charlie Hebdo, which he directed for almost twenty years: “Its tragic laughter. It is the only newspaper in the French press that laughs with death.” And to respond, in the name of all of us, we universalists of laughter, lovers of snubbing the inevitable, to those who did not understand why so many French people took to the streets on January 11, 2015 to make tribute to Charlie : “If we can’t laugh anymore, then everything is ruined.”
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