One flaw keeps it from greatness

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[T]he fact is that "comedy" really is a "tool" for injustice.

Comedy is just comedy. When it (or anything else) is used to perpetuate injustice, it's a "tool" of injustice. When it's used to laugh at and make fun of tyrants and oppressors, it's a "tool" of liberation.

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Lazy + smart = efficient.

Serial killers, at least in interviews, seem grim people, overwhelmed by their inner monsters, so to speak. There is nothing comic about them. They seem to take themselves very seriously.

Persecution of hated groups is not done through comedy. Comedy is the result of people who take themselves so seriously, they must demean others. The jokes against the Jews were not so much meant to hurt the Jews (since they were told to an all-Aryan audience), but to make the people present feel superior to the Jews outside, to placate their sense of self-importance, their total lack of the capacity to laugh at themselves.

The point of the commedia was not so much laughing at others, but laughing at yourself. It's those who cannot laugh at themselves who become self-righteous and capable of committing horrors. You laugh at others when you recognize in them what you also are. The people in town laughs at the drunk, because they know at one point of another they also have been wasted and behaved like that.

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Space For Sale.

I believe that the OP's basic assumption is in error. The murderer, Jorge, is not a psychotic serial killer, and he is not portrayed as such. He's much more complex than that. He's a fully rational man who's actions are understandable within the context of his world where blasphemy, heresy, and other religious offenses were capitol crimes. He does not kill because he has internally debased or dehumanized his victims.

Jorge is in a quandry. He respects knowledge and learning, and yet as a monk believes that he is in possession of holy revealed knowledge which must not be questioned. He does not "abhor" comedy in an absolute sense. He believes that some educated men can handle Aristotle's teachings on comedy, but that simple minded men could be led into damnation by comedy and laughter. He cannot destroy Aristotle's book because it is Aristotle's, but at the same time he cannot allow it's contents to be made public, again because it is Aristotle's.

When he determined that a knowledge with the power to damn men's souls was about to be turned lose on the world he used murder to stop it. A man acting on that motivation today might indeed be judged psychotic, but in Jorge's time I think it was well within the bounds of rationality.

I would say the concept of 'comedy' (at least in the film) boils down to knowing oneself, and those around you. If you can laugh at yourself, for example, it often signifies that you're aware of your weaknesses. If you can't laugh, it means you're in denial about something, and therefore can't deal with it on anything other than a serious level. You end up narrow-minded and closed to alternative explanations, which may or may not do the job. Closed-mindedness is what generally shapes the types of individuals we don't want to see.

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This post and most of the replies it got made me wonder if people had been seeing the same film i have.

Jorge de Burgos abhorred comedy because if you can laugh at something, you can doubt/question it.
And in the end, if you value comedy, there might be no stopping it, i.e. in the end you could laugh at god and the teachings of the bible, the pope, the church and so on, and thereby questioning all this.
As he said at one point in the movie: "There is no progression in knowledge" (paraphrasing here), meaning that to go deeper and question things will lead you away from the righteous path, away from heaven and into the realms of the devil.

He believes he is doing god's work by "protecting" the world, shielding it from perceiving comedy and laughter as a good, valuable thing through the writings of Aristotle.



We're hiding like elephants when they're happy.