«E anche Pasolini ride». Umorismi, conformismi, degenerazioni pasoliniani sotto la lente d’ingrandimento pedagogica

The essay explores and rereads, through the categories of pedagogy, how the theme of laughter, humour and irony run through the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini. If in his formative years the poet links these themes to the rural world intertwined with the dimension of childhood, in the works of his maturity they will remain an existential and mythological point of reference, a vital and at the same time literary objective. The restorative power of the laughter of childhood and the peasant world is in fact replaced in Pasolini’s production of the 1960s by a humour that is the filter through which the bourgeois world proposes itself by mystifying reality. Laughter, which populates Pasolini’s works in this second phase of his life, is the bitter mirror of the regressing bourgeoisie. Humour becomes, therefore, a device for representing the civil and linguistic decadence of society, but in doing so, it also becomes for the poet an expedient of criticism, education and hope.