Pure Comedy: The Racial Politics of Domestic Work in ¡Cómo está el servicio! (Mariano Ozores, 1968)

Abstract

This essay analyses the intersections of race, gender, and comedy in ¡Cómo está el servicio! (Ozores 1968) to argue that the film brings to light anxieties about purity and womanhood associated with the rapid development of the final years of the Franco dictatorship. By focusing on the film’s brief, yet poignant portrayals of Africans and Afro-descendants and the film’s representations of sex and miscegenation, I argue that ¡Cómo está el servicio! demonstrates the ways that concepts of national purity remain inextricably linked to a politics of the home and the preservation of white womanhood against perceived threats of outside contamination, explicitly articulated through race. Indeed, ¡Cómo está el servicio! visually expresses the ways that appropriate white womanhood linked to domesticity enables women to succeed in an inward-looking Catholic society that simultaneously exalts capitalist principles in order to survive.