However, some related passages can be detected in his first book of Poetics, in the Rhetoric, and in the Nicomachean Ethics. Unfortunately, it is not possible to trace adequately the ancient theory of humour because of the loss of Aristotle’s second book of Poetics central to The Name of the Rose. HUMOUR AS A HUMAN FACULTYĢ Humour and laughter have been studied since antiquity.

I show how they relate, on the one hand, to one traditional understanding of humour as the pivotal human differentia specifica and, on the other, to Eco’s semiotic writings on sign function, unlimited semiosis, and abduction.

I begin, however, by setting Eco’s views of laughter and humour in context. The main focus of this article will be to trace how Eco’s theoretical views of laughter and humour are woven variously into his novels: The Name of the Rose (1980), Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), The Island of the Day Before (1994), and Baudolino (2000). As such they are present in four different aspects (Santoro-Brienza, 2002: 325-337): first, there are some scattered writings expressly devoted to the topic, second there is The Name of the Rose, third a large number of his texts, especially his columns, squibs, and parodies, are humorously written and produce a humorous effect (e.g., the Diario minimo ), and fourth, as Santoro-Brienza put it, all of his works are expressions of Eco’s humorous and playful disposition. However, it can equally be argued that humour and the comic are unifying themes in his writings (Farronato 2003). Since Eco is a highly prolific writer, it was not twenty but just five years later that he published The Name of the Rose, the novel which accounts for his fame beyond academic circles and which presents an erudite discussion of the ‘mysterious and metaphysical mechanism’ called laughter. Laughter is a mysterious and metaphysical mechanism’ (Eco in Capozzi 1989: 415). The last remaining difference is laughter. He justified this undertaking by arguing: ‘Signs and language are no longer attributes exclusive to man. 1 In an interview given in 1975 Umberto Eco announced that he was planning to publish, ‘in twenty years, maybe’, a book on the comic.

Serendipities by Umberto Eco