Grey Humour: The Comedy of Tedium in Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio’s El Jarama (1955)

Abstract This article presents an innovative reading of humour within the classic Spanish postwar novel, El Jarama by Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio (1955), typically deemed dispassionate, solemn, and deadly serious. Grounding its interpretation in Humour Studies, it explores undercurrents of desolate, almost deliberately non-funny amusement that encourage stifled laughter from bleak situations, before immediately questioning the veracity and appropriateness of mirthful reactions. It coins new ways of understanding bathetic, grim comedy, based on situations usually interpreted as being mirthless: sluggish ‘grey humour’, originating fundamentally, and paradoxically, in boredom; ‘comic-kazi’, a backfiring, debilitating, anti-comic funniness; and ‘hardship humour’, amusement based on privation.

Overviews of postwar prose typically overlook funniness. 17 When scholarship does identify humorous techniques within postwar Spanish prose, it almost always begins in the 1960s, after the social-realist novel's 'discernible close', finding irony in Juan Goytisolo's Juan sin tierra (1975) and Luis Martín-Santos' Tiempo de silencio (1962). 18 My analysis, heeding Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's warning of 'abuso de generacionismo' in Spanish literary criticism, illustrates that earlier postwar novels (and films) were already demonstrating generic unsteadiness, before Martín-Santos' famed realismo dialéctico. 19 Recent studies have problematized social realism's purportedly detached, impassive stance, with Sarah Leggott and Ross Woods illustrating that many 1950s novels are 'pigeonholed as realist' mainly 'in an attempt to separate them from the more self-reflexive and non-realist texts of the 1960s and 1970s'. 20 Perriam et al. challenge the long-held commonplace, derived from Josep Maria Castellet and Juan Goytisolo, setting 'early tentative realism (1950s)' against 'openly critical realism (late 1950s to the mid 1960s)'. 21 Elsewhere, dissident, subversive attitudes have been highlighted: 'el realismo fue una especie de subversión radical contra la censura'; 22 and '[t]hrough paradox and irony, socialrealistic novelists subvert the mythic and heroic ordering of history offered up by historians of the Regime'. 23 This article scrutinizes precisely how this 'paradox and irony' functions in El Jarama, developing understandings of the complex relationship between art and politics under Franco's dictatorship.
Let us recognize the boldness of finding humour where it has been consistently unnoticed, perhaps deriving from generic assumptions positing incompatibilities, even antitheses, between comedy and tragic dissatisfaction. However, such mutual exclusion is roundly refuted by humour scholars, and in El Jarama, pain/comedy symbioses are well-attuned and mutually la novela realista de los años cincuenta en España (Madrid: Taurus, 1971); Fernando Morán, Novela y semidesarrollo (una interpretación de la novela hispanoamericana y española) (Madrid: Taurus, 1971); and Jo Labanyi, Myth and History in the Contemporary Spanish Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1989). 18 Herzberger, Narrating the Past, 40. See also Manuel Durán, ' "Así que pasen diez años", la novela española de los setenta', Anales de la Narrativa Española Contemporánea, 5 complementary, intensifying bathetic frustration. 24 Some theorists maintain that 'comedy might be bad because it is sombre', for, when applied to artworks played for laughs, the word 'sombre […] picks out a demerit' (whereas in tragedy it 'picks out a merit'), yet the Spanish postwar novel crafts enigmatic, unnerving humour out of (mock-)solemnity and gloom to highlight that fecund comedy is already and will always be a staple of everyday life. 25 Such humorousness makes the social-realist novel far more interesting and nuanced than is often acknowledged, particularly when contextualized within the Francoist dictatorship wherein 'seeing the funny side' was fraught with ambiguity. Contemporary critic José Mancisidor observed an España de dos Españas: la del mito y la de la realidad, la que se hunde en su angustia y su martirio y la que germina, en un medio de tormento del nacer, con su eternal ilusión a cuestas. 26 Accuracy and exactitude are ambivalent: the goal is to represent reality as it really is because the reality already represented is false: tal y como es, and tal y como parece are two different things. Indeed, in his list of 'los restantes medios para desactivar la censura', Hans-Jörg Neuschäfer lists '[e]l chiste, la ironía, incluso el humor negro' first, closely followed by '[e]l empleo de modelos de comunicación, textos y géneros literarios cotidianos y/o consagrados por la tradición como medio de banalización'. 27 This article examines that blend of 'ironía' and 'banalización', central to grey humour, but suggests that ashen funniness is more acquiescence than attack.

Grey Humour
Whilst black humour weaves amusement out of serious or taboo subject matter, grey humour signals the beleaguered decay of funniness, not in melodramatic extravagance or distorted grotesquerie but in boredom, vacillation and dawdling. 28 The comedy of entrapped vulnerability, nausea and irritation is far removed from good cheer and bonhomie; less dystopian or apocalyptic than jaded or jaundiced. Repeated, failed efforts to accomplish anything are fundamentally funny, and passing time or contending with 24  solitude brings greater solitude. Metronomic tones of relentless cynicism leave readers cold, eliciting disgruntled, embittered, enfeebled laughs as thingspeople, even-exist, persist, endure and die away. Humour theory has approached 'greyness', in the contexts of ageing (Alain Blayac's work on the 'grey comedy' of Evelyn Waugh's jokes) or of unnerving laughter (Bruce Friedman's bilious humour as 'black' or 'some fairly dark-hued color'), and both Robert Johnstone and Katrina Bachinger refer to the comedy of their respective studies as more 'grey' than black; however, the concept remains relatively undeveloped. 29 In 1972, Sanford Pinsker noted the 'graying of black humor' in contemporary American novels, yet analysed typical grotesquerie (through Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Berger). 30 Grey humour is distinct: haltingly comic, its pulverized specialists in failure build an aura of impending calamity, frustrated listlessness and perpetual stalling, wherein hollowed-out jokes sound the death-knell for contentment.
Furthermore, grey humour's dependence on boredom destabilizes existing humour theory, which typically emphasizes either gallows humour or freewheeling, energizing, 'white' comedy: with its 'comic view of life', 'comic spirit'; 'vision of life'; 'liberation or elevation'; whose 'keynote [is] freedom from restraint'. 31 Yet, as Elliot Oring insists, '[a] theory of humor cannot be a theory of only those examples a theorist happens to appreciate'. 32 Humour theory often assumes comedy's inherent reconciliation and ordering, lifeaffirming tendencies, linking laughter (the 'best medicine') and positive revolution, making chaotic circumstances more manageable. 33 Additionally, recent understandings, such as benign violation theory, recognize humour resulting from two specific appraisals: (1) there is a violation of some rule or order that a given society holds sacred, and (2) this violation must, crucially, be benign. 34 Yet my coinage, wooden, deadened 'grey humour', reveals something altogether gloomier, refusing the distance from suffering that such theories imply. Instead of soothing reinforcement of shared values, it indicates the twitching, turgid titter, a trembling at laughter's core. Always on the way out, it is funny without ever being fun. Truncated jokes are nearly there, always on the turn, not quite fully-fledged. As asphyxiation replaces anticipation, perpetually stalled, left-behind individuals say, 'Look at how insignificant we (all) are'. Theorists insist that comedy requires a firm, stable 'comic climate', 35 ensuring fixed genre boundaries. 36 For Max Eastman, 'things can be funny only when we're in fun', and humour is 'dead' if readers are 'in dear earnest'. 37 Conversely, the comedy of comedown (particularly that of El Jarama) toys with tragicomic frontiers, blending miscarried comedy with sedateness and sombreness. Charles Gruner introduced the 'game of humor', interpreting comedy as 'a succession of games' implying 'fun, leisure, entertainment, recreation'. 38 However, Spanish postwar humour conveys the message 'Pack it away, it's no use', or 'I can't be bothered. Whatever'. Down for the count, it throws in the towel: 'Game over. You win. I'm not playing anymore'. Moreover, as Johan Huizinga writes, '[p]lay begins and then at a certain moment it is "over". It plays itself to an end'. 39 The trudge back to work is never far away. Grey humour is not a humour of 'winning', but of losing, sorely. 40 Moreover, whilst boredom and funniness may seem uneasy bedfellows, dullness is often a major generator of comedy since failure and discontent frequently spawn absurd, droll expressions of the damp squib, a rich seam running through, for instance, British television and radio. 41 Circular efforts to pass the time are emphatically miserable, and the dull itch of comedy ends not with a bang but with a whimper. A fair dose of self-deprecatory wit may be present, but it serves to conceal only temporarily the terror of silence: the creeping perception that, when all is said and done, there is just nothing to do. Although literary histories of ennui usually overlook humour, this article explores comedy-boredom dovetailing wherein suffering and death are part of larger, grimmer jokes, provoking the risus sardonicus. 42 Grey humour resembles that self-reflexive, tedious comedy identified by nineteenthcentury philosopher Karl Rosenkranz: 'Boredom is not comic in itself but a turn-around towards the comic occurs when the tautological and boring are produced as self-parody and irony'. 43 Through analysing laughless laughter, limping out of step, and humour bereft of 'authentic' amusement, I introduce the 'comic-kazi': the purposeful, self-sabotaging dimming of comic effect, adrift between anticomedy, tedium and tragedy.
My archive is local; my conclusions, global. Whilst my analysis relocates stale, desolate humour within Spanish social realism, enmeshed with Francoist policies limiting individual freedom, this new mode of reading is applicable more broadly to manifestations of humdrum humour of beige or plain vanilla: the suffocating, quivering funniness of languor that lays down its arms, raises the white flag and admits defeat.

El Jarama: (N)ever a Dull Moment
Susan Sontag once questioned whether a 'work of art had [sic] the right to bore us', but Sánchez Ferlosio's El Jarama (1955) offers an example of this taken to an agonizing extreme. 44 Equating the 'real' speed of the reader with the speed of the novel as narrated-à la Gérard Genette's 'isochronic' text-this excruciating work is replete with anodyne dialogue that continues, devoid of real action, until one day tripper, Lucita, accidentally drowns in the titular river. 45 Conversations are written so true to life that early reviewers assumed they were 'genuine' exchanges, taped and transcribed from real people. 46 We feel the weight of its trudge, and, unsurprisingly, critics emphasize 'invariabilidad', deeming it 'la gran epopeya de la vulgaridad'. 47 From grim portrayals of postwar años de hambre (Laforet's Nada) and atomized, directionless existence (Cela's La colmena), by 1955 the social-realist novel had shifted to the tentative beginnings of desarrollo, wherein war-based horror and postwar destitution slip into the background, only vaguely acknowledged by an impatient youth. Spain joined the United Nations in 1950 and, towards the end of the decade, was admitted to institutions such as the International Labour Organization (1956), the European Atomic Energy Community (1957) and the International Monetary Fund (1958). However, tedium-as reflected in literature-abounds in the absence of any significant social or economic change. Ceaseless epimone tests the reader's patience, persevering laboriously and remorselessly, through page after page of insipid chit-chat, as though stuck in the most strenuous, colourless conversation. Familiarity breeds contempt: what we initially perceive as unworthy of our interest may well be just that. Freighted by its own despair, is El Jarama worth our attention? Thinking from the humour amidst Francoist atmospheres of repressive stagnation, I analyse laughter as liability, exploring moments when readers are encouraged to half-laugh, laugh badly, laugh at the wrong time, laugh at victims' expense or gasp at scenes that laughter has already evacuated.
Firstly, the social-realist pledge necessitates a lack of authorial intrusion, let alone reactive interpretation. 48 However, El Jarama's slippery humour shows the hazard and indeterminacy of such aspirations; as Sánchez Ferlosio admitted, '[l]a dificultad está en saber prescindir de los puntos de vista propios'. 49 Indeed, the critical history of El Jarama reflects a certain ambiguity regarding its essential tenor, with early commentators emphasizing objectivity: 'es una novela realista cien por cien'; '[d]escribe con morosidad y exactitud […]. La fidelidad se parece a la del pintor que retrata con el realismo puntual de un fotógrafo'. 50 Others went further ('hecho estadístico'), or located 'excesiva autenticidad'. 51 Conversely, I show that social-realist disrelish is riddled with suspicion; after all, as Epps insists, 'something else and extra is required, something that will keep readers busy, if not entertained'. 52 I propose that the grey comedy of languor and disgruntlement, the disheartening drollness of doldrums, supplies just such a 'diversion', embracing the paradox of a genre intrinsically 'highly intentional', 'provocative' and politicized, 53 yet simultaneously stripped back, disinclined and deprived of personal intensity.
-¿Qué tierra esta? Pues será porque estoy mirando el campo. Despite stichomythia, stasis and inertia (even while drinking, at a bar) make for rich grey humour, featuring what Laura Salisbury, in an analysis of Beckett's correspondingly plodding, insipid comedy, calls 'deftly timed mistimings'. 63 Ostensibly, El Jarama seems too garrulous or irrelevant for gaiety, negating comedy's implicit message, that 'life is fun!' Nevertheless, a distinctive, grumbling humour pervades through clipped, inexpressive conversation and grim, foreboding irony. This may be the thrill-seekers' day off, but free time is just as-if not more-mind-numbing than the working week. Banal 'Ya' and wooden full-stop after 'La mar' form an ironic, dejected recognition of futility after what commenced as an exclamation at natural beauty: '¡Qué tierra esta!' The narrator then intervenes, providing a lyrical description of the landscape, yet semantic fields bespeak destruction, foreshadowing mortality, as 'ardiente', 'inhóspito', 'borroso', 'impalpable' and 'sucio' culminate in 'cáustico sol' (12). Is this just joking, an alibi or a 'get-out-of-jail-free' card from an otherwise detached narrator, and is this joking fundamentally just (acceptable, or doubly cruel), given the ostensibly dispassionate, slice-of-life framing? Critical (over)emphasis on solemnity often struggles with such uncertainties, insisting both that authorial interjections 'in [no] way interfere' with the 'reader's ready comprehension', yet simultaneously deeming them 'ironic and baffling'. 64 Grey humour actively courts colder responses by disengaging its audience, building abrasive funniness that readers may dislike, abhor, or simply be apathetic towards. Dialogue is crushing and comical: -Nada; a disfrutar se ha dicho; pasarlo bien.
-¡La juventud, a divertirse!-dijo Lucio; están en la edad. (16) As weariness continues, style betrays content, with the lack of enthusiasm evident in 'disfrutar'/'divertirse'. Crucially, early reception was not universally positive vis-à-vis realism, with Rafael Manzano berating this 'receptor y vehículo de vulgaridades y mediocridades', asking '[e]s que estamos buscando, en España, premiar el "antiquijote"?' In particular, he disparaged mundanity: 'instalar la simple existencia sobre soportes mediocres'. 65 Might expressions of ostensibly unvarnished truth beget mere flatness and dullness? Decades later, Juan Goytisolo criticized social realism for demanding 'una novela tan real como la vida misma', unable to shape its desired social ends. 66 Accordingly, grey humour reinforces El Jarama's status as ponderous drag, delighting in wasting (our) time, for failed, unfunny funniness plunges characters further into the mire. Both unbearable and irresistible, titillating through unnecessary prosaic detail, there is a certain charm and knowingness in the novel's confidence in its own mimesis. Willing us to give up, or put it down, this is the un-Divine Comedy, a novel of severe friction and attrition, accompanied by dry, Moreover, the fragment emerges just before Lucita's death, and this whole conversation was engineered bathetically 'por hacerte hablar' (227). El Jarama's downplaying, discrediting humour is characterized by a lengthy build followed by a brief, flatlining pay-off, and its sheer endlessness becomes a meditation on its failures: a (non-)comedy of stalemates and stale mates. Grey humour's collective sigh, or, its shared, self-immolating chagrin at wasteful existence resembles Ríos Carratalá's identification of the 'sonrisa del inútil' throughout Spanish culture, a disheartening wit of ordinariness: 'Pueden ser absurdos, arbitrarios o fruto de una ignorancia que nos incapacita para desenvolvernos en el quehacer cotidiano'. 69 Theorists Hurley, Dennett & Adams, offering a cognitive analysis, argue that humour closes off exploration, saying '[n]othing down these alleys! Save your time and energy!' 70 Spanish social realism likewise terminates readers' search for enthusiasm, foregrounding utter hesitancy, and this tormenting, plodding funniness approaches Lauren Berlant's notion of 'flat affect' and 'recessive aesthetic': the underperformance of passion, and the withdrawal from energized engagement. 71 Presentation is bland and blasé, so restrained as to appear aloof, and extremes of joy or grief are difficult to determine in a resolutely unflappable tone, yet still comic via poker-faced, straight-faced stances. Like Mark Twain's conception of the 'humorous story', El Jarama withholds comic cues and clearly categorizable 'nubs', 'points' and 'snappers', yet retains a bathetic, sinking amusement. 72 Grey humour goes nowhere in particular, and fizzles out just as quickly as it begins.
-¿Nada, verdad? Ya guardarías hasta cola para ir. (127) Through abulia, readers are bored to death, even to tears, but also, strangely, to laughter. Nevertheless, this is but the bitter jest of horror vacui, of characters locked in what Ortega y Gasset terms 'convicciones negativas' (his definition of post-crisis aboulía): […] el no sentirse en lo cierto sobre nada importante impide al hombre decidir lo que va a hacer con precisión, energía, confianza y entusiasmo sincero: no puede encajar su vida en nada, hincarla en un claro destino. 74 Caving in and bowing out, grey humour stems from paralysis, dissatisfaction, and defeat, as, throughout the novel, 'la palabra esperanza sufre una reducción grotesca'. 75 Grey humour reveals an Achilles heel, a chink in the armour; when asked '¿Qué tal (ha ido)?', it responds 'Bueno, eso … lo típico, sabes, ¡lo normal!' Writing on Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy, 1877), Matthew Arnold denounced a scene wherein Levin is late for his wedding, unable to find his dress-shirt. 'It turns out to import absolutely nothing', because true-to-life intentions add no 'significance'. 76 In El Jarama, this is the point, and such (anti)comedy resembles Von Wilpert's 'humorloser Scherz', the joke without humour. 77 When Mely asks Dani about the 'boda en algún pueblo', this hangdog humour initially escalates, only to contract: -Será una cosa divertida.

Comic-kazi: Unfunniness
Humour theory typically emphasizes surprise, but El Jarama's listless comedy of sour-grapes enshrines its lack thereof. 79 'Comic-kazi', I argue, constitutes a self-sabotaging, backfiring funniness, arising when characters are absurdly aware of their misfortunes, yet keep striving regardless, pursuing happiness in full knowledge of its unobtainability. Self-knowledge is fundamental: as philosopher Thomas Nagel posits, building on Albert Camus, a mouse is never absurd 'because he lacks the capacities for selfconsciousness and self-transcendence that would enable him to see that he is only a mouse. 80  -[…] ¿Es que hace falta tener ganas de algo? Estás tranquila y a gusto con lo que tienes y se acabó.

Deadpan Drollness
Having discussed manifestations of grey humour, literary histories of boredom, narratorial ambiguities and failed fiestas, this article will now examine pertinent theoretical underpinnings, beginning with abstruse deadpan. For Nick Holm, writing on Australasian satire, the form's essential 'schtick' is to seem unaware of, or uninterested in, any potential amusement. Performance works 'against-or at least not with-the comic grain of the underlying content', denying or delaying confirmation of textual comic status. 84 Deadpan signifies the 'muting and flattening of those formal, aesthetic elements' rendering it 'recognisably comic'; likewise, throughout Spanish social realism, narratives resist their own humorousness ('comic-kazi'), violating readers' accustomed sense of (suitable) comicality. 85 Similarly, Lauren Berlant's work on 'flat affect' identifies suppressed forms ('stuck, neutral, or withheld') refusing to certify concrete meaning, rebuffing aesthetic endorsement through 'underperformed emotion', withdrawing and snubbing interpretive information. 86 Such readings bolster grey humour, founded on bathos, disgruntlement, purloined punchlines, and 'stifled laugh[s]'. 87 Moreover, turning unrelenting, unremarkable tedium into (non-)amusement resembles Bergson's understanding of comedy's 'systematic absentmindedness', observable especially in Don Quijote: 'the comic itself, drawn as nearly as possible from its very source'. 88 Abstracted, preoccupied individuals are distanced from their surroundings, 'as though the soul has allowed itself to be fascinated and hypnotized by the materiality of a simple action'. 89 Throughout El Jarama's lose-lose situations, characters are abstracted and inattentive during simple tasks, building a disheartening, low-spirited laughter of routine.
Furthermore, realism and deadpan comedy exhibit surprising similarities. The former's inherent tendency to dehumanize and flatten the ambitions of already motiveless, aimless figures, through generic, stock characters, resembles comedy's modus operandi, which thrives on standardized types. 90 For Bergson, comedy derives from inflexibility and rigidity: 'we laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing'; 'something mechanical encrusted upon the living'. Repetition is laughable because reiterations are both monotonous and ceaselessly worsening, ageing: a 'continuous evolution of a being growing ever older; it never goes backwards and never repeats anything'. 91 Grey humour finds nothing new in dehumanized, passive, gradual downturn, and my insistence on nothingness and emptiness-literalized in Laforet's Nada-is well-established within Humour Studies. For Marcel Gutwirth, humour constitutes the disappointment and disproportion of being 'set' to apprehend 'something', only to hold 'nothing', and Arthur Schopenhauer writes of laughter 'occasioned by a paradox, and therefore by unexpected subsumption'. 92 Faded 'comic-kazi' is comedy's wasteland, entropic vacuity at the heart of humour. Theorist Jean-Luc Nancy identified laughter's characteristic 'disappearing in its coming', and, for Immanuel Kant, humour stems from 'the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing'. 93 We laugh into the void, and persevere-but a tear is always near.
Lastly, ambiguities of grey humour, 'comic-kazi' and 'just-joking' equivocality manifest through failed funniness, for even joke-telling and anecdote-sharing bring discontent. Don Marcial tells Manolo 'funny' stories about a 'tío […] con el vehículo ese que se gasta para circular por el mundo, junto a otro carrito de esos de coca-cola' (103) who approached the group joking 'Si esto es la cocacola, yo entonces lo menos soy la Coca-Coña'. Marcial guffaws: -[…] la pechada de reír … Y es que se llama Coca de apellido; la doble coincidencia. ¿Qué le parece? -Es humor, es humor-asentía Manolo. This craving for comedy, and Marcial's absurd, protracted efforts to explain jibes ('la doble coincidencia'), create a devastating, melancholy conflation of wretchedness and humorousness. Jesters bears their scars, with no comic consolations, and laughter laughs 'into the gaping maw of grim reality'. 94 Comedian Mike Myers observed that '[c]omedy characters tend to be a _____ machine; i.e., Clouseau was a smug machine, Pepe Le Pew was a love machine, Felix Unger was a clean machine, and Austin Powers is a sex machine'. 95 Social-realist timewasters are boredom machines, suffering 'quiplash' from jokes beyond their 'tell-by' dates-even at parties. Grey humour resembles Salisbury's description of Beckettian gags, which 'either go on too long or never really get going at all', describing not temporal 'flight' but its 'slow and arduous passage': […] incongruities and running gags may be funny, but this comedy already seems a little past its sell by date, or on the turn, as it were. And comedy that is going off, slapstick that doesn't really work, comes, like a slow hand clap, to beat out elapse rather than contract it; it becomes a form of walking on the spot in which waiting is first sloughed off, then measured and finally increased. 96 El Jarama's joking-attempts wear thin from unending prolixity, while readerly tension, friction, resistance and hindrance build mounting pressure, never fully or meaningfully released into mirth. As Beckett once told director Sir Peter Hall ahead of the 1955 production of Waiting for Godot, '[m]ake them wait longer. Make the pauses longer. You should bore them'. 97 If brevity is the soul of wit, grey humour is the reverse. When Manolo orders water, his register is absurdly proper: '¿Tiene usted la bondad de ponerme un buen vaso de agua fresquita?' (101). Resulting misunderstandings with barman Mauricio cause great consternation, escalating-yet simultaneously stifling-comedically. 'Agua fresca no hay', and Manolo laughs 'forzadamente', explaining 'no era más que un decir' (101). Formal language is a preposterous sham, and dampening bathos emphasizes poverty in the manner of hardship humour. Yet Mauricio persists, amusingly banal: -Pues yo a lo que no es una cosa no lo llamo esa cosa. ¿Tiene sentido? Será una frase hecha o lo que quieras, pero yo cuando digo agua fresca es que la quiero fresca de verdad. Lo demás me parece como hablar un poquito a lo tontuno, la verdad sea dicha.
-Viene siendo por las trazas. Se le añadían un par de ceros; la cosa es relatar. (205) If 'la cosa es relatar', can El Jarama's supposed authenticity be reconciled with its fictional status? Where might its 'par de ceros' be? Realism wishes to represent all groups from all angles, to be everything to everyone-'pouvoir tout dire', in Paul Éluard's words. 103 Yet it must cherry-pick its 'slice-of-life' profiles, and exaggeration-particularly of grotesquerie-shifts focus onto principles of selection and figures who overstate. As Wolfgang Iser writes of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), 'unstructured material […] is taken directly from life itself, but … it cannot be taken for life itself', for 'details no longer serve to reinforce probability or to stabilize the illusion of reality'. 104 Accordingly, El Jarama interrogates the sincerity of any novelistic truth-claims, far more complex than apathetic, slice-of-life, freeze-frame reportage.

After Laughter
Reviewing the entire novel, criticism works hard to avoid pessimism. Gómez Ávila acknowledges despair ('existencia […] vacía') but stresses hope ('futuro progresista'), Mainer locates 'tanta vida y tanta esperanza' and Perriam et al. perceive 'tentative renewal of optimism' in Lucio's decision to seek employment as baker's assistant the following day. 106  Elsewhere, it incites readers to 'buscar' a 'remedio' to this 'sociedad estancada', and, portraying the 'insensibilidad de esta generación de gente resignada a su propia pequeñez', reaffirms the reader's 'propia sensibilidad' (Spires, 'El papel del lector implícito en la novela de posguerra', 99-100). Elsewhere, readers are spurred to '[e]l compromiso, la confrontación, precisely in the fact that ambition, hope, vision and purpose have never been his defining features, or, if they once were, they are no longer because life's hard knocks and seemingly arbitrary cruelties have extinguished them along the way. He employs the idiom 'se queda todo en agua de borrajas' (231), aware that all may collapse. As 'agua' fuses with urine, perhaps dreams, too, will leak away without a trace. * * * * * To conclude, let us consider the teleology of grey humour: seditious, or conservative? Humour Studies traditionally underscore defiance: 'liberation or elevation'; 'limitations of the human condition miraculously overcome'; 'protective filter of humour through which readers are capable] once again-if only momentarily-of handling it and soldiering on'. 109 Conversely, rejecting comedy's vitality ('comic rhythm' of 'human life-feeling', 'felt life'), El Jarama's morose, clouded comedy of comedown, previously unexplored, generates submissive nihilism and hollowness at odds with optimistic sentiments. 110 Jokers are traditionally considered rebels or heroes, 'icon[s] of human resourcefulness in the face of impossible odds' for their 'ingenuity in freeing [themselves] from the predicaments that threaten [their] existence'. 111 However, these failed, self-aware jesters ('comic-kazi') are unadventurous. Indeed, Michael Ugarte concludes that it is 'reductive' to suggest that all postwar literature demonstrated 'committed resistance to the government's impositions'. 112 André Breton argued for humour's 'liberating element' and 'elevating effect', calling it the 'superior revolt of the mind'; however, grey humour cannot fend off its own ennui, let alone subvert repressive regimes. 113 After all, Rudolph Herzog concluded that whispered jokes during Nazi Germany were a 'surrogate for', not a 'manifestation of, social conscience and personal courage', and Christie Davies, analysing myriad cross-cultural jokes, found no 'significant social consequences', expressing no 'profound moral or existential truths'. 114 Grey humour's stony-Since its release, El Jarama has been variously 'recuperated, tragedized, allegorized', and read as historical parable. 122 My humour-based approach offers fresh, divergent readings, creating space for scholarship locating analogous currents across postwar literature; a savagely-funny obituary to Francoist dreams of national flourishing, showing that only grey humour was possible in brutal, 1950s Spain. 123 The basic disgruntled joke presents itself: why are characters so leaden and dull? Because postwar circumstances offer no alternative. Indeed, despite pervasive tedium, the fact that El Jarama remains canonical, in print more than sixty years after its first edition, suggests something rather captivating about its forensic capture of everyday existence. One must caution against elitist implications that the mundane goings-on of 'unremarkable' folk should not be the substance of serious fiction. 124 Nevertheless, I argue that its overwhelming confinement signals but the cul-de-sac of comedy, a humour of exhaustive enumeration and agonizingly dull minutiae. Formal circularity marches on the spot, bringing cheerfulness to a deflating, dragging halt. As Herzberger summarizes, 'the social realists realign the static structures of myth in order to alter the meaning associated with them, but do so without undoing the mythic paradigm itself'. 125 Despite an ostensibly detached, reassuringly unruffled narrator, laughter at plight is muffled and fractured, and the comedy of qualm and comedown offers nought but accommodation under repression. One early reader suggested that Sánchez Ferlosio only killed Lucita out of boredom. 126 Ironies of tiresomeness abound, for he would abandon the novel for over four decades.
Bringing new perspectives to a canonical work in Spanish literary history, this article contributes to scholarship on the Spanish novel, social realism, and Humour Studies by introducing grey humour, hardship humour and self-sabotaging 'comic-kazi'. 127 Humour of hiatus, hindrance, and hold-up