Strategies of the Comic Between Drama and Novel. Achille Campanile’s Three One-Act Plays in 1925

In 1925, Anton Giulio Bragaglia at his «Teatro degli Indipendenti» staged the three Campanile’s one-act plays: Centocinquanta la gallina canta, Il ciambellone, L’inventore del cavallo, which some critics considered forerunners of Ionesco’s Theatre of Absurd. Campanile wrote them together with his first novel, Ma che cos’è quest’amore?, appeared in instalments between 1924 and 1925. In the novel, he transferred characters, dialogues, entire scenes taken and quoted literally from the plays. A kind of extreme intertexuality which is part of a general comic strategy, that pretends to ignore differences between drama and novel to increase the hilarious and alienating effect of sketches and jokes. The essay aims to analyse this element to show it as a practice that concerns the tradition of the comic, employed by Campanile in an original and exceptional way. From this point of view, early XX century humour overcomes the categories of «drama» and «novel» representing them as cultural schemes that can be, at any time and anyway, target of parody.