Stand-up comedy still knows how to make people laugh, in defiance of fairness

For some time now, the question I’ve been asked most often during interviews is whether and how “political correctness” has influenced or changed my work as a comedian – which is none other than the remake with updated terms of the question “what is the limit of satire?” which was placed at the time of the cartoons on Mohammed, “Je Suis Charlie” etc. Question – the current one – which is often declined in the form of “is it true that you can no longer say anything?” or “can you still laugh at everything?”, with a tone that oscillates between bored and paranoid depending on the masthead. Not that I’ve ever lacked answers to these questions; but during my last stand-up comedy show, which I took around the Italian clubs in March, I decided that the audience itself would respond, with its reactions, live. A geographically varied audience (from Pisa to Milan via Rome, Turin, Naples, Bologna, Bari, Perugia…) to which I submitted an hour and a quarter of new material where I pushed my sense of humor a little more on there, trying as always to raise the bar: and therefore in addition to the jokes about the taxman and the gourmet pizza – and a renewed repertoire of jokes about my not exactly slender stature and my not exactly attractive voice (“it’s not easy to live with this entry: every time I try to whisper romantic words in a girl’s ear under the stars I am mistaken for tinnitus”) – I treated with irony and in a paradoxical key issues such as the handicap (or rather: its taboo and the rhetoric with which it is treated), the disease (or rather: its bogeyman), body positivity, verbal violence, contemporary sex life. Last but not least – indeed, in the lineup it was the opening piece of the show – I made provocative jokes about the Meloni government and “the return of fascism”. In short, there was enough to get up and walk away – at least according to one narrative. But reality (once again) proved to be very different from the social algorithm: not only did the spectators not leave the room during my provocations, but no one even slapped me – not that I’m Chris Rock nor was Will Smith in the room; but in an age of mass mythomania, one can never know who thinks he is who.