Umberto D Full Movie English Subtitles

[Zulema Estabrooks]

Reviewedby: Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages by Louise D'Arcens Jenna Mead Louise D'Arcens. Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. x, 209. 19.99. It is a truism that nothing kills a joke faster than explanation. This situation becomes dire when the joke crosses national boundaries, languages, generations, occasions, speakers, all of those things that target jokes to their intended and knowing audience. We've all had this experience and yet, somehow, in the decade since its uploading to YouTube, the Norwegian skit ystein og jeg (Medieval Help-Desk), with English subtitles alone, has had 5,124,763 (and counting) views. How? Why? Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages gamely rides into this anarchy and sets about bringing some analytic rigor to its examination.

Comic Medievalism has four main parts, each with two chapters. The introduction provides a crisp "set-up" by sharpening the focus from simply laughing to laughing at, with, and in the Middle Ages; noting the ubiquity of "comic representations of the medieval past"; clarifying such representations as "based on a cluster of practices, rituals, beliefs, people and events that have come to be constituted as quintessentially 'medieval'"; and nominating such representations as "a vehicle for commentary on the present as well as the past" (6). D'Arcens calls on Umberto [End Page 320] Eco's (non-comic) The Name of the Rose to model three categories of comic medievalism: representations of the Middle Ages that are patently "risible" and provoke "a kind of modern-centric Schadenfreude" that laughs, with relief, at the past age (Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court); representations that collapse temporal distinctions, allowing us to laugh, via comic identification, in the Middle Ages (Bill Bailey's "Pubbe Gagge"); and representations where "resilient folk comedy" allows us to laugh with the Middle Ages as a form of comic resistance (Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev) (10, 11). Comic medievalism, as it whizzes through generic forms, engages periodicity through its reflections on modernity, inflects historicism by revealing the affect in our relations to past temporalities, and offers an ethico-political agenda in its grounding in social commentary.

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