“Someone’s Laughing” (“C’è qualcuno che ride”)

Translated by Marella Feltrin-Morris

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “Someone’s Laughing” (“C’è qualcuno che ride”), tr. Marella Feltrin-Morris. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2021.

Originally published in the Corriere della Sera on November 7, 1934, “Someone’s Laughing” became a part of the Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno) when it was included in the final collection, A Single Day (Una giornata), which was issued posthumously by Mondadori in 1937.

Written in the same year that Pirandello received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the story is one of many in Pirandello’s Stories for a Year that takes its title from a phrase uttered by one of the characters in it. Other stories whose titles come from characters’ lines include “Some Guy Died in the Hotel” (“Nell’albergo è morto un tale,” 1929) and “You Laugh” (“Tu ridi,” 1912).

As evidenced by this latter title, the theme of laughter is a key trope in Pirandello’s works and a frequent subject of reflection in his stories as well as in works from other genres, including his theory of humor from On Humor (L’umorismo, 1908). In “Someone’s Laughing,” the story focuses on the experience of laughter as a disruptive power, exploring the tension it elicits among those who are not laughing, who in turn are obsessed with tracking down and rooting out the source of the laughter. In typical fashion for Pirandellian humor (umorismo), laughter emerges as a natural, instinctive manifestation that reveals the individual’s own difference in contrast to the rigid fixity of society and its formal conventions. This contrast highlights how Pirandello uses his fiction to critique the lack of spontaneity in social life. At the same time, it speaks to the feeling of apprehension caused when the free expression of the individual is regulated or rendered unacceptable. Written during the height of Fascist power in Italy, many critics have also interpreted this story as a political allegory criticizing the regime’s repressive tendencies. One prominent figure, the famous Sicilian author Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989), identified the setting as a Fascist rally and suggested that Pirandello’s narrative uses a Kafkaesque depiction to alienate readers from the spectacle.[1] It is interesting to note that the story, while rich in visual and emotional description, remains abstract in the sense that it never specifies a particular, concrete location and does not name its characters; there is an abiding sense of generality in the story that lends to interpretations of it as a metaphor. This more abstract facet also resonates with traits in Pirandello’s late writing, which is in this way quite different from his early stories that are more firmly realist.

The Editors

A rumor slithers through the gathering:

“Someone’s laughing.”

Over here, over there, wherever the voice reaches it’s like a viper rearing its head, or a cricket leaping, or a mirror shattering, eyes slashed by its flying pieces.

Who dares laugh?

Everyone abruptly turns around, searching the room with scathing glances.

(The enormous ballroom is lit by four bright crystal chandeliers hanging over the crowd of guests, but its vault up above remains lifeless and barren, gloomy with dusty antiqueness. Only the crusty surface of a gruesome seventeenth-century fresco seems alarmed, as it stretches from one end of the vault to the other, having taken great pains to muddle up and silence the brutal frenzy of its paint under a black layer of eternal night. Now it looks as if it were only waiting for the rest of the commotion to die down and for the ballroom to be cleared out.)

Perhaps, upon closer scrutiny, one would spot a few long faces twisted through pitiful grimaces into painfully complaisant smiles—but none that could be declared actual laughs. Now, a courteous smile may well be allowed, it may even be mandatory, if it’s true that the gathering, while very serious, also aspires to look like one of the customary events organized to entertain citizens during the Carnival season. Indeed, on a platform covered by a black carpet, there’s a small orchestra, and bald-headed, skeleton-like musicians play one tune after another as couples dance trying to give the gathering the semblance of a ball, at the invitation—or rather at the command—of some photographers who have been hired for the occasion. But so clashing are the reds and the azures of their gowns, and so sickening the fragility of their bare shoulders and arms, that one would almost guess those dancers have been dug up for the event, living toys from a bygone era, preserved and now wound up again for this spectacle. After watching them, one feels the urge to grab hold of something solid and rough: here, for example, the sweaty back of the head of this man sitting nearby, red-faced and fanning himself with a snow-white handkerchief. Or the idiotic forehead of that old lady over there. Meanwhile, something else is strange: on the squalid buffet table, the flowers are not fake. Sad to think of the gardens they were picked from just this morning, under a clear, crisp drizzle. And what a pity, this pale rose already crumbling, a dying scent of powdered flesh still lingering inside its fallen petals.

Scattered here and there among the crowd, some domino-clad guests look like friars in search of a funeral.[2]

The truth is that none of these guests know the reason for this invitation. It just echoed throughout the city like a call to rally.[3] Now, uncertain as to whether it would be better to hide in a corner or draw attention to oneself (which wouldn’t be so simple either, given all the crowd), each guest watches the others, and those who sense they’re being watched as they try to retreat or come forward wilt and freeze on the spot.

“Oh… how funny, you’re here too?”

“Uh, it looks like we’re all here.”

No one, in the meantime, dares ask why everyone’s there, fearing they might be the only ones who don’t know the reason, which would put them at fault in case those gathered had been called upon to make an important decision. Some look around surreptitiously, trying to spot the two or three who, supposedly, would be in the know, but they cannot find them. They may be consulting in a secret chamber, where every now and then someone is summoned and hurries over, growing pale and leaving the others in anxious consternation. Everyone tries to infer from the qualifications, status, and connections of the one who has just been summoned what is being deliberated upon in there, but no one can quite figure anything out because, only a little earlier, someone else was summoned who had quite the opposite qualifications and connections.

In the widespread dismay caused by this mystery, the agitation grows by the minute. It’s a well-known fact that restlessness spreads in no time at all, and rumors, as they travel from mouth to mouth, become something completely different. And so, every corner of the ballroom is reached by such nonsense that everyone is left stunned. People’s spirits are in turmoil, and what exudes from them is nothing short of a nightmare. Cadenced by the agonizing sound of the orchestra, the strangest phantasms leap before everyone’s eyes among the dizzying hum of voices and the glare of lights in the mirrors. And like smoke unraveling into thick spirals, guilt-ridden consciences burning with the pangs of secret regrets spill out all kinds of fears and suspicions. In many of the guests, the instinctive eagerness to run for shelter manifests itself in the most unexpected ways: some keep blinking; others stare blindly at the person next to them with a tender smile on their face; others keep buttoning and unbuttoning their vests. Better to play dumb. Think of something completely unrelated. Easter’s coming early this year. Some guy’s name is Buongiorno.[4] But how oppressive, all the while, is this farce with oneself.

The fact—if it is indeed a fact—that someone’s laughing should not, it seems to me, cause such shock, given everyone’s state of mind. If only it were just a shock! In reality, what has been triggered is the fiercest contempt, precisely because of everyone’s state of mind. Contempt arises as if it were a personal offense, this gall to laugh out loud. The nightmare hangs so unbearably over everyone precisely because no one finds it legitimate to laugh. If one starts laughing and the others follow suit, if this whole nightmare collapses all of a sudden into a collective laugh, there goes everything. In the midst of all this uncertainty and suspense, one has to believe and feel that tonight’s gathering is most serious.

But is there really someone who insists on laughing, despite the rumor that has been slithering through the crowd? Who is he? Where is he? He must be hunted down, grabbed by the collar, pushed against the wall and, as fists are shaken at him, questioned as to what he’s laughing about, and at whom. Apparently, he’s not alone. Oh, there’s more than one, then? At least three, they’re saying. But are they together, or is each for himself? It seems they’re together. Is that right? So they’ve come here intentionally just to laugh? Seems like it.

The first one to be noticed is a stout girl dressed in white, all flushed in the face, buxom, a little clumsy, doubled over with laughter in a corner of the other hall. At first people hadn’t paid attention to her, partly because of her gender and partly because of her age. They were only irritated by the unexpected sound of laughter; a few had turned around as they would have in the presence of something unbecoming, let’s even call it impertinent or downright arrogant, if you will, but all in all forgivable. Nothing more than a child’s laugh, which she immediately stifles when she sees she’s being watched. Hunched over, she flees from that corner, both hands pressed against her mouth, but then, perhaps because as she ran away she had been holding back her laughter, once she reaches the other hall it bursts out again, this time unrestrained. Appalling, indeed. A child? Turns out she’s at least sixteen, with a pair of eyes that spew out flames. It appears she’s been running from one hall to the other as if she were being chased. Yes, as a matter of fact she is being chased, by a very handsome young man, blonde like her, who’s also laughing hysterically as he runs after her. Every now and then he stops, bewildered by the impudence with which she burrows her way into every nook and cranny. He’d like to get a grip on himself, but he can’t. He turns this way and that as if he were hearing his name being called, and the way he’s biting his lips he must be trying to hold back a surge of laughter gurgling inside his stomach. There, they’ve just discovered the third culprit: a springy little fellow who’s been bouncing around, his short, tiny arms beating against his round, firm pot-belly like a pair of drumsticks. He has a bald spot like a shiny mirror surrounded by a red crown of curly hair, and a blissful face with a nose that laughs even more than his mouth, and eyes that laugh more than mouth and nose together, and his chin is also laughing, his forehead is laughing, and so are his ears. He’s wearing a tailcoat, like everybody else. Who invited him? How did the three of them sneak into the gathering? No one knows them. Not even I.[5] But I know he’s the father of those two youths, a well-to-do gentleman who lives in the countryside with his daughter, while his son studies here in the city. They may have ended up at this fake ball by chance. Who knows what they said to each other as they came here, what secret agreements and tricks they had already been up to, pranks that no one else but they knew about; what sort of gunpowder, as colorful as fireworks, they had in store, ready to be set off by the tiniest spark, be it nothing more than a fleeting glance. The fact is that they cannot stick together. Still, they search around for each other from a distance, and as soon as they make eye contact, they hide their faces, and from under their pressed hands such guffaws spurt out¬—truly a scandal in the midst of all this gravity.

So oppressively does such gravity loom over everybody that no one can accept the possibility that those three may instead be outside of it, removed from it, and that they may have a totally innocent, perhaps silly reason for laughing like that about nothing. The girl, for example, by the mere fact that she’s sixteen and accustomed to living like a filly in the middle of a field in bloom, a filly that leaps up with every gust of wind and scampers around happily—she herself doesn’t know why she’s laughing. One would bet she has no idea, not the slightest hint of the scandal she’s been raising along with her father and her brother, who are, like her, jubilant, clueless, and far from suspecting anything.

And so, when they’re finally reunited on a sofa in the other hall, the father between his son and his daughter, all three cheerfully exhausted and eager to hug each other to celebrate the great fun they just treated themselves to, a fun that sprung out of their very joy and poured over into that beautiful laughter like evanescent foam from crashing waves—right then they see the entire crowd of guests coming towards them. From the three large glass doors, slowly, very slowly, with the melodramatic pace of a dark conspiracy, all the guests are advancing like a black tide underneath a sky that is suddenly caving in. At first the three don’t understand at all, they don’t suppose this funny maneuver may have been set in motion just for them, and they exchange a glance, still half smiling. Their smiles, however, increasingly turn into astonishment until, since they can neither escape nor retreat, pressed as they are against the back of the sofa, they instinctively raise their hands as if to push back the ever-approaching crowd that is now towering hideously before them. From the middle door emerge three leaders who, until then, had been congregating in a secret chamber to discuss what to do with them regarding their inadmissible laughter. They have determined that a solemn, memorable punishment is warranted. The leaders are now at the head of the crowd, the hoods of their dominos pulled all the way down to their chins, all three mockingly handcuffed with napkins like soon-to-be-punished criminals come to beg for mercy. As soon as they’re standing in front of the sofa, an enormous, sardonic laugh explodes with a blast from the whole crowd and reverberates several times, horrifically, throughout the ballroom.[6] The poor father, distraught, fumbles around with shaking hands until he manages to grab hold of his children, and he runs off with them, bracing himself, shivers splitting his back, without a clue as to what is going on, chased by the dreadful thought that the whole city may have suddenly gone mad.