Medical merriment in the works of Enrique Jardiel Poncela

Abstract

AbstractEnrique Jardiel Poncela, a twentieth-century Spanish comic writer principally of novels and plays, developed a personal approach to creating humor that involved a novel vision of humor’s literary potential (for his time). Beginning in 1926, he undertook the renovation of humor in creative writing in Spain based on his new objectives. In his peculiar jardielist style in which art for art’s sake is his predominant motive, he pursued a distinctive mode of writing characterized by inverosimilitude, incongruity, wild inventiveness and hyperbole. As one of his comic resources, he made abundant use of doctors, medicines, therapies, diseases, medical terminology and ignorance of medicine by the public in general for his literary purposes. To date, study of this important aspect of his work has been largely neglected. This study proposes to fill that lacuna by examining his use of deformation of language, character and situation and the comic techniques he utilized for purposes of satire and parody in his novels and plays.