Through a Comedic Glass, Darkly: Ethics, Humor, and Home Ownership in Spain’s Early Technocratic Years (1957–1963)

Abstract

The current essay analyzes three oppositional film comedies produced during Franco’s totalitarian regime, after Spain transitioned to an Opus Dei technocratic rule and after the Ministry of Housing was created to solve the chronic lodging problems of the time. My analysis focuses on how La vida por delante/ Life Ahead (Dir. Fernando Fernán Gómez, 1958), El pisito/ The Little Apartment (Dir. Marco Ferreri, 1959), and El verdugo/ The Executioner (Dir. Luis García Berlanga, 1963) humorously critique the contemporaneous housing predicaments and the existing residential legislation. The article argues that these comedies effectively breach the hegemonically sanctioned thresholds of ethical, political, and aesthetic decorum of contemporaneous Spain by successfully resorting to an eminently materialistic, antimelodramatic discourse and to unsympathetic characters, prone to successive moral capitulations in their desperate chase for a decent housing and social advancement.