Strange Ways of Laugh: Lo humor transculturale nelle metamorfosi del genere Western

Strange Ways of Laugh: Transcultural humor in the matamorphosis of the Western genreThis paper focuses on laugh and the evolution of its representation in classical and post-classical Western movies. It deals with film chronology, mythology, and cultural heritage, the impact of migration and migrant cultures on the raising of the American way of laughing, and the startup of a new kind of transcultural and hybrid humor building, introduced and successfully screened by the Italian authors of the so-called Spaghetti-Western set and mostly filmed in Spain, and, later on, by the international authors of the so-called Gay Western. Spaghetti and Gay Western movies strongly reshape, stress, and exploit gender and macho stereotypes, highlighting hidden aspects of the classical genre they are reshaping. The methodology is comparative and cross-cultural (dealing with film history and film criticism; translation studies; movie industry & production; ancient mythology; with American and European studies and cultural studies). The results clearly highlight what happened to laughing men (and women) and why it happened the way it happened all along the Western movie history. It has also been revealed that the humorous and surreal-surrealist effect of the late Western genre is often linked to the revival of a series of countercultural stereotypes about Mexico, depicted since the Mexican Revolution as a land of transgression and escape, and associated with an imaginary of altered perceptions, influenced by plant drugs and alcohol. Looking back from the many comedic, caricatured, and paradoxical excesses of this diverse series of tributes and reincarnations, it is perhaps easier to reassess the true extent of the heroicomic and humorous potential of the Western genre, amplified, reinvented, revitalized, and reintroduced into circulation by the spaghetti Western and its clichés. Many recent authors and moviemakers. like Eastwood, Tarantino, Rodriguez, Coen Brothers, and others, revisited the postmodern tradition of the new Western and its heroicomic legacy. _________________________________________ Abstract Il presente studio si occupa della risata e delle sue rappresentazioni nei film Western del periodo classico e moderno. Vengono affrontate, in quest'ottica, diverse e significative questioni di cronologia e di mitologia, analizzate specialmente dal punto di vista dell'impatto che il contatto tra culture diverse ha avuto nella nascita e nello sviluppo dell'identità cultural