“You Laugh” (“Tu ridi”)

Translated by Marella Feltrin-Morris

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “You Laugh” (“Tu ridi”), tr. Marella Feltrin-Morris. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2023.

Originally published in Corriere della Sera on October 6, 1912, “You Laugh” (“Tu ridi”) was then included in the short story collection The Two Masks (Le due maschere) published by Quattrini in Florence in 1914. A revised version of that collection was published in 1920 as You Laugh (Tu ridi) by Treves in Milan, making this the title story. Pirandello finally then recollected it as a part of the seventh Collection of his Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno), All Three (Tutt’e tre, 1924).

This story, while relatively straightforward in terms of its plot, is significant in its articulation of themes that are central to Pirandello’s poetics and broader outlook. Ostensibly, it is the story of how the protagonist, Signor Anselmo, comes to discover the nature of his own laughter. He has been laughing in his sleep every night, waking up his wife and his granddaughter with eruptions of violent laughter. His wife, who is beset by her own (invented?) maladies, is jealous and assumes he is flirting in his dreams. But he cannot remember them, and so he does not understand what he could be laughing at; indeed, he is so incredulous that he seeks the opinion of a doctor to help him. He seems settled on the fact that he will never know, but strangely comforted by the thought that at least in his sleep he is escaping from the difficulties of life and enjoying pleasure denied him in the waking world. It is thus an ironic reversal when, in the end, Signor Anselmo finally remembers his dream and the source of his laughter, only to discover that it is “foolish” and indeed cruel rather than merry and joyful. Does this mean he can now no longer laugh? Or must he instead knowingly accept his own foolishness in order to continue laughing? Pirandello’s story is what we might call strangely philosophical in these reflections – engaging philosophical questions about the nature of dreams and laughter that were actively debated in the early 1900s, but responding through a fiction that turns these discourses on their head. In the end, the outlook here resonates more with Pirandello’s own poetics of humor, which he theorized in his essay On Humor (L’umorismo, 1908) and worked out creatively in earlier stories and novels, like his important modernist novel The Late Mattia Pascal (Il fu Mattia Pascal, 1904/5), which is clearly an influence here.

This story also had an afterlife in adaptation, as it became the source material for Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s film of the same name, Tu ridi, released in 1998.

The Editors

Yanked violently by his wife in the middle of the night, poor Signor Anselmo snapped out of his dreams once again.

“You’ve been laughing!”

Dazed, with his nose still stuffed up from sleep, and a bit wheezy after the turbulent awakening, Signor Anselmo scratched his fuzzy chest and asked, frowning:[1]

“Again… by golly… again, tonight?”

“Every night, every night!” bellowed his wife, livid and exasperated.

Signor Anselmo propped himself up on one elbow and, still scratching his chest with the other hand, asked with irritation:

“But are you really sure? Maybe I have indigestion, maybe I just make burbling sounds with my lips, and to you it seems like I’m laughing.”

“No! You laugh, you do! You laugh!” she insisted. “Do you want to hear what it sounds like? Here it is.”

And she imitated the hearty, gurgling laugh that her husband produced every night in his sleep.

Stunned, mortified and almost incredulous, Signor Anselmo asked again:

“Just like that?”

“Just like that! Exactly like that!”

His wife, exhausted by the effort of that laugh, collapsed again on the bed, abandoning her head on the pillow and her arms on the covers, moaning:

“Ah, God, my head…”

In the bedroom, a night candle placed on the chest of drawers before the image of the Madonna of Loreto was nearly extinguished, its dying flame sobbing its last.[2] With each sob every piece of furniture seemed to jolt.

In the same way, irritation, humiliation, anger and rancor jolted inside of Signor Anselmo’s battered soul. His unexplainable laughs made his wife suspect that, as he slept, he must be reveling in who knows what kind of bliss, while instead she had to lie sleeplessly next to him, afflicted by a perpetual headache, nervous asthma, heart palpitations—essentially, every possible ailment an oversensitive woman of almost fifty could have.

“Do you want me to light the candle?”

“Light it, yes, do! And bring me my drops right away: twenty, in just a tad of water.”

Signor Anselmo lit the candle and climbed out of bed as fast as he could. As he walked barefoot and in his nightshirt by the armoire to get the bottle of sedative and the dropper from the drawer, he saw himself in the mirror and, instinctively, raised his hand to fix his combover and the cherished illusion that he was somehow hiding his bald spot. His wife, still lying in bed, noticed it.

“He fixes his hair!” she sneered. “He has the gall to fix his hair, even in the middle of the night and in his nightshirt—while I’m dying!”

Signor Anselmo turned as if he had just been bitten by a viper. He pointed his finger at his wife and shouted:

“You are dying?”

“I wish,” she whined then, “I wish the Lord would make you feel, not a lot, but just a little bit of what I’m suffering right now!”

“No, my dear,” grumbled Signor Anselmo. “If you were really sick, you wouldn’t bother reprimanding me over an involuntary gesture. I did nothing more than raise my hand, nothing mo—darn it! How many drops did I put in?”

In a fit of anger, he threw onto the floor the water to which, instead of twenty, who knows how many drops of sedative he had added. And so, still barefoot and in his nightshirt, he was forced to walk over to the kitchen to get more water.

“I laugh...! Ladies and gentlemen, I laugh...,” he mumbled to himself as he tiptoed down the long hallway with the candle in his hand.

A little voice emerged from the shadow of a door that opened into the hallway.

“Grandpa...”

It was one of his five granddaughters, Susanna, the eldest and dearest to Signor Anselmo, who called her Susì.

Two years earlier he had taken in those five granddaughters along with his daughter-in-law, after the death of his only son. His daughter-in-law, a wicked hussy, at eighteen years of age had snatched his poor boy. Luckily, a couple of months earlier she had run off with another fellow, a close friend of her deceased husband’s. And so the five little orphans (the eldest of whom, Susì, was only eight years old) had ended up on Signor Anselmo’s shoulders—his own shoulders, since it was clear that they could not count on Grandma’s shoulders, burdened as she already was by all her ailments. Grandma didn’t even have the strength to look after herself.

But she certainly would look if Signor Anselmo involuntarily raised a hand to fix the twenty-five hairs he had left on his head. Because, on top of all her ailments, Grandma still had the courage to be fiercely jealous of him, as if at the tender age of fifty-six, with his gray beard and bald head, surrounded by all the delights that fate had showered upon him, including those five granddaughters whom he didn’t know how to provide for with his meager salary, and with his heart still bleeding over the death of his poor son—as if, with all of that, he could still while away his time flirting with pretty ladies!

Wasn’t he laughing about that, perhaps? Of course! Of course! Who knows how many women smooched him in his dreams every night![3]

The fury with which his wife yanked him, the livid anger with which she screamed at him, “You laugh!” surely had no other motive than jealousy.

Which was... nothing, really. What was it, after all? Just a tiny, ridiculous flake of devil’s stone, which fate kindly handed to his wife so she could amuse herself by grinding his sores, all the sores with which fate had generously sprinkled his existence.

Signor Anselmo placed the candle on the floor by the door, so the light would not wake up the other granddaughters, and entered the little room, following Susì’s call.

Another “consolation” for Grandpa, who loved her so much, was that Susì was growing up malformed: one of her tiny shoulders was higher than the other, and crooked, and day after day her neck became more and more like a thin stalk, too weak to support her too-large head. Ah, Susì’s lovely head...

Signor Anselmo leaned over his granddaughter’s bed to let her scrawny little arm wrap around his neck. He said to her:

“You know what, Susì? I laughed!”

Susì gazed at him with painful wonder.

“Tonight, too?”

“Yes, tonight, too. A biiiiig laugh... Oh well, honey, let me go now to get some water for Grandma... Sleep, sleep, and make sure you laugh too, ok? Good night.”

He kissed his granddaughter’s hair, tucked her in, and went into the kitchen to get the water.

Assisted so dutifully by fate, Signor Anselmo had also managed (thus obtaining even further consolation!) to elevate his spirit through philosophy. Though the latter had done nothing to undermine his deeply rooted faith in morality, it had robbed him of the comforting trust in a God that rewards man’s misery in the afterworld. Since he could no longer believe in God, he consequently could no longer believe, as he would have wanted, in some prankster devil lurking inside him and getting kicks out of laughing every night just to arouse sinister suspicions in the soul of his jealous wife.[4]

Signor Anselmo was certain, dead certain, that he had never had any dream that could motivate such laughter. He didn’t dream at all! He never dreamed! Every night, at the usual time, he fell into a leaden, pitch-dark, hard and abysmal sleep, from which he struggled and agonized to wake up. His eyelids weighed over his eyes like two headstones.

And so, ruling out the devil and ruling out dreams, there was no other explanation for those laughs than some novel illness: perhaps some visceral convulsion that manifested itself through that boisterous jolt of laughter.

The next day, Signor Anselmo decided to consult the young specialist in diseases of the nervous system who came every other day to visit his wife.

This young specialist charged his customers not only for his expertise, but also for his blond hair, which he had lost prematurely due to all his studies, and for his eyesight, which had grown dim for the very same reason.

In addition to a specialty in diseases of the nervous system, he had another specialty, which he offered to his customers for free: his eyes, behind his eyeglasses, were of two different colors: one yellow and one green. He would close the yellow one, wink with the green one, and in that way he managed to explain everything. Ah, everything, he could explain everything with marvelous clarity, so that, even if they were condemned to die, his customers were always utterly satisfied.

“Tell me, Doctor, could someone laugh in his sleep if he’s not dreaming? I mean laugh out loud. A biiiiig laugh...”

The young doctor began to illustrate to Signor Anselmo the most recent and authoritative theories about sleep and dreams. He lectured for about thirty minutes, larding his speech with all that Greek terminology that makes the medical profession so respectable. In the end he concluded definitively that no, one could not. It was impossible for someone to laugh like that in his sleep if he wasn’t dreaming.

“But I swear to you, Doctor, I really don’t dream. I don’t. I’ve never dreamed!” exclaimed Signor Anselmo with exasperation, noticing the sarcastic snicker with which his wife had reacted to the young doctor’s conclusion.

“Eh, no, believe me! That’s what it seems like to you,” the latter added, closing his yellow eye once again and winking with his green one. “That’s what it seems like to you... But you do dream. It’s proven. You just don’t remember your dreams because you sleep very soundly. Normally, as I explained to you, we only remember the dreams we have when the so-called veils of sleep have somewhat dispersed.”[5]

“And so, do I laugh about what I’m dreaming?”

“Without a doubt. You dream about happy things, and you laugh.”

“What a nasty trick!” blurted out Signor Anselmo. “I mean the fact that I’m happy, at least in my dreams, and that I cannot know it! Because I swear to you, Doctor, I don’t know anything about it! My wife yanks me, screams at me ‘You laugh!’ and I just stare at her like a fool because I really don’t know that I laughed, nor what I laughed about.”

But there it was, there it was! Ultimately, that must be it! Yes, yes, it had to be so. Nature must sneak up on him in his sleep and rescue him, fortuitously. As soon as he closed his eyes over the spectacle of his misfortunes, nature stripped his spirit of its mourning clothes and led him gently away, light as a feather, through the green pastures of the most joyful dreams. True, it did cruelly deny him the memory of who knows what exhilarating delights. But at any rate, it rewarded him, and though he remained unaware of it, it revived his soul so that the next day he could bear the troubles and hardships of his fate.

Now, returning from his office, Signor Anselmo would sit Susì on his knees, Susì who could imitate so well the big laugh he let out every night, having heard it many times from Grandma. Signor Anselmo would caress Susì’s sweet, wrinkled face, already the face of an old lady, and ask her:

“Susì, how do I laugh? Come on, honey, let me hear my beautiful laugh.”

And Susì, throwing her head back, her rickety little neck in full view, would burst out with that jovial, full, hearty laugh.

Signor Anselmo listened to it in bliss, savoring it, all the while holding back his tears at the sight of the little girl’s scrawny neck. Shaking his head and looking out the window, he sighed:

“I must be so happy, Susì! Who knows how happy I must be when I laugh like that in my dreams!”

Unfortunately, however, Signor Anselmo was destined to be deprived even of this illusion.

Once, by chance, he happened to remember one of those dreams that made him laugh so hard every night.

It went like this: a certain Torella, an old, bowlegged office mate of his, was climbing up a broad staircase with great difficulty, leaning against his walking cane. Their office manager, Cavalier Ridotti, sprang up behind him and cruelly entertained himself by hitting, with his own walking cane, that of Torella, who needed it for support because of his bow legs. Finally, the poor man could not stand up anymore, so he was forced to bend over and, grabbing onto a step, started kicking back like a mule in the direction of Cavalier Ridotti. The latter guffawed and, nimbly dodging those kicks, tried to stick the tip of his cruel walking stick right up between poor Torella’s exposed buttocks, and after a few tries he succeeded.

Awoken by that sight, Signor Anselmo, his laugh suddenly frozen upon his lips, felt his breath being drained out of his lungs. His spirit sank. Oh, God, was that what he laughed about? That foolishness?

Indeed, that’s what he laughed about! That was all the happiness he thought he was enjoying in his dreams! Oh, God... oh, God...

But the philosophy that, already for a few years, had been reasoning inside of him, came to his rescue once again and showed him that, after all, it was quite natural for him to laugh about such foolishness.[6] What else did he expect to laugh about? In his situation, the only way to laugh was by becoming a fool himself.

How could he laugh otherwise?