Literary Humour
Humour can be found in the works of some of Argentina's best-known writers. For example, Jorge Luis Borges was known for his dry, sometimes dark, humour. He begins his story "The Dread Redeemer Lazarus Morrell" by describing Bartolomé de las Casas as having taken pity on the natives suffering and dying in the mines of the Antilles, thereby leading the Spanish government to relieve their suffering by importing African slaves to suffer and die in the mines of the Antilles. His one-paragraph short story "On Accuracy in Science", probably inspired by a remark of Lewis Carroll's, imagines a map drawn at 1:1 scale, so that it covers the entire country that it illustrates. Borges and another of the country's leading writers, Adolfo Bioy Casares, created the pseudonymous H. Bustos Domecq, under whose name they wrote, among other things, comic detective fiction.
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Famous quotes containing the words literary and/or humour:
“Plato—who may have understood better what forms the mind of man than do some of our contemporaries who want their children exposed only to “real” people and everyday events—knew what intellectual experience made for true humanity. He suggested that the future citizens of his ideal republic begin their literary education with the telling of myths, rather than with mere facts or so-called rational teachings.”
—Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)
“Wit is a weapon. Jokes are a masculine way of inflicting superiority. But humour is the pursuit of a gentle grin, usually in solitude.”
—Frank Muir (b. 1920)