Tra comicità e umorismo: Dar’ja Doncova, “regina del giallo ironico”

Abstract

In Darya Dontsova’s detective novels the categories of terrible and tragic do not play a significant role but, on the contrary, are deliberately attenuated through the deployment of a number of different strategies that make it impossible to read these novels “без улыбки на лице” [without a smile on one’s face].
Starting from the fundamental works of Bergson (Le rire), Freud (Der Humor) and Pirandello (L’umorismo) and from a series of theoretical concepts accounting for the workings of humour, this paper analyses the various devices employed by Dontsova, the undisputed “queen of the ironic detective story”, to create comic effects.