Believing in images is increasingly difficult. Or perhaps it would be better to say that we should all believe a little less in the images that bombard us every day on the internet, since a photo of Pope Francis wearing a Balenciaga-style duvet generated by artificial intelligence has been mistaken for real by many people. It happens more and more often that a photograph taken for real goes around the world before being debunked, by which time the damage is done, the Mandela effect is imprinted, and the memory is formed. Macron with dozens of wreaths around his neck in Polynesia, Trump wriggling while being arrested by the American police, Nino Frassica dressed as a carabiniere who falls into a canal in Venice during a scuffle with Johnny Depp in blue pyjamas. It could be an image to add to the long list of fakes, perfectly in line with contemporary trends of post-truth, yet it’s not.
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That paradoxical image, as opposed to the swag-wearing Pope, exists because it actually happened on the set of the 2010 film, The Tourist, with Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. Nothing strange, although there is a lot of strange. Nino Frassica it fits perfectly in all the frames in which we can paste it as if it were a figurine, an animated puppet that regardless of the surrounding environment remains identical to itself. Paradoxical, in fact, and invariable, we are used to the fact that it can emerge in any context while remaining coherent with its comic charactereven when he plays other parts, whether it’s a marshal of the carabinieri in Don Matteo or of a presenter in a Sofia Coppola film. And that’s exactly how Frassica plunged into the swamp of without any problems LOL 3a format that puts us in front of some questions about the future of comedy, all quite complicated to untangle.
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There is the question of virality, of the spontaneous and uncontrollable creation of memes that generate the chain effect of success – or at least, part of this – and of the perennial novelty to which platforms have accustomed us for almost a decade now, where everything is a catalog to leaf through, and everything gets old immediately. Then there is the question of the very meaning of this program based on surprise and partial improvisation, which is why the first season had so much response from the public, which has little to do with the skill or greatness of the comedians involved. In the three editions of LOLexcluding sad coincidences such as the outbreak of war on the day of the release of the second season, the cast is always rather balanced, in harmony with the idea of old glories and new recruits, internet and TV, theater and cinema. However, it is the mechanism that was flooded long before the resources ran out, transforming the amazement for a context of discomfort in which the competitors should be placed in a warm nest of comfort, fake restrained laughter, fake suffering that, if anything, exudes boredom. The only one that manages to leak a modicum of spontaneity is, in fact, Nino Frassica and that happens for one simple reason: he didn’t do anything.
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Sitting in an armchair for most of the program, Frassica only allowed himself a few sketch of his most classical repertoire, surreal quizzes from which come not loud but puffed laughter – snort, it is said today on the internet – which resonate like graceful notes in the face of the hustle and bustle staged by his colleagues, intent instead on surprising everyone with their exaggeration. Less is more, Frassica has done so little that he has even eliminated himself causing a few laughs with his own jokes, and indirectly giving a lesson in style to an adoring audience who understood too late what the trump card would be to get out of it not effective but at least moral winners.
Nino Frassica it has always been like this, in his forty-odd year career. He’s done everything from commercials for loans to host’s Friendsfrom Miss Italy to the narrator de The collegefrom Hyenas to The Cesaroni, and in whatever setting he found himself, it was always Nino Frassica. His figure is that of surreal comedy, all based on puns, distortions, ambiguities, qui pro quo, calembour and reversals of meaning that always leave the spectators dumbfounded. Laughter is a crescendo, it’s not an immediate blow, almost an exhaustion that digs until you give in to its abyss of nonsense. The comedy school he comes from is more that ofMilanese vaudeville from the 1960s and 1970s more than that of the Sicilian tradition, although its closeness to Pirandello’s principles of humor is undeniable. In his career, come on programs by Renzo Arbore where he made his debut with characters such as Friar Antonino da Scasazzathe principle of the canvas remains firm: Frassica’s style is not a flow, it is an intermittent discharge that is based on pillars that he himself has built and on which he juggles, making everything pass as spontaneous, despite being firmly in the writing that at most can return, change, reverse, but never miss.
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Making fun of the form, in his case mostly that of television, playing with the signifiers. Like a three-card trick, Frassica’s speech is confusing because he always stays close to the familiar term we expect and then swerves at the last minute. In a way, it’s a bit like what other comedians have done after him, like the youngest Valerio Lundini, also very skilled, albeit with a different style and intent from Frassica, in overturning the television container by exasperating its forms, emphasizing the more stereotyped and hackneyed aspects of public discourse in the mass media. Or like Lillo and Greg, a comic duo who have often played on the semantic interchangeability of images and cinematic formulas both on radio and on TV: think of their fake trailers on 610 or of the now cult sketches like Utopia.
In this way, Nino Frassica guaranteed eternity. Remaining far from the content, mutatis mutandis, the container is intact over time. The advantage of his great illusory ability, this linguistic sleight of hand that allows him to immerse himself perfectly in any place where something happens, as long as we talk, is that he is basically unshakeable. It’s not satire, it’s not imitation, it’s not parody, it is never the substance that is affected, Frassica remains suspended in time, with a horizontal expansion that allows it to move laterally through each context – which, in fact, it has always done. Now that political satire programs are just a memory, with the exception of a faded Crozza, now that more than twenty years have passed since formats such as The Eighth Dwarf and little or nothing remains of that comedy on television, Nino Frassica continues undisturbed as if a day had not passed by Arbore’s eighties television. So much unchanged that it moves like an eel in a format that puts everyone on the same level, old and young, novices and masters. If we wanted to talk about disadvantages, however, we could say the same thing. Nino Frassica has never had anyone against him, if not the very context that he has mocked over the years, the discursive structure and the formality of a place of fiction like television. But in that same context, however, he always sat comfortable, undisturbed, as in the armchair of LOLas in everything he has done.