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

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.