Where the Three Roads Meet — Daniel De Lucia

A linguist, a translator, a teacher: Tell us briefly about yourself and your research.

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the History of Science and hold a PhD in Linguistics, English Studies, and Philology. My research has been recognised with the Maria Baiocchi Prize (2013) and the Rebecca Benatoff Prize (2014). The former was awarded for publishing the first Italian study devoted to Lavender Linguistics, which appeared in the Italian psychology journal State of Mind.

I currently teach English Language, Literature and Culture, as well as Spanish Language, Literature and Culture. I am also a certified special education teacher qualified to teach at every level of the Italian school system. In addition to my teaching and research activities, I have served as an editor for the journal Free Ebrei and have organised and spoken at numerous academic conferences throughout Italy. I also write short fiction and poetry.

Given your studies, what is your understanding of "humour" proper; or, at least, of those features thereof to which you have paid the keenest attention? And how does your scholarship merge with, or is influenced by, your daily encounters with a potentially ubiquitous phenomenon such as humour?

My research focuses primarily on the cultural dimension of humour. In particular, I explore the convergences and divergences among three distinct socio-cultural traditions: British humour, Jewish humour, and gay humour. I am interested not only in what distinguishes these traditions but also in the historical circumstances that have shaped their development.

More recently, my work has expanded to include the relationship between humour and artificial intelligence. I am especially interested in whether these culturally specific forms of humour can be learned, interpreted, and reproduced by AI systems, given that they rely heavily on linguistic pragmatics, shared cultural knowledge, and contextual interpretation rather than on language alone.

Thinkers as different as Nietzsche, Judith Shklar, and Derrida have argued that "cruelty" proper is baffling because, even if we want to eliminate it from human life, it always finds a way to re-emerge therein, almost as if it were part and parcel of the same human life. Has cruelty ever played a significant role in your scholarship's purview, and/or your understanding of social and cultural phenomena?

Yes. One aspect of my research has examined the role of cruelty in black humour, particularly in the work of Jewish, gay, and Anglo-American stand-up comedians.

I believe that artistic expressions grounded in this kind of transgressive humour have enjoyed enduring success—and will continue to do so—because they allow theatre and performance to accomplish something that everyday life rarely permits. They give voice to thoughts that usually remain unspoken and transform them into a shared artistic experience.

To my mind, this is one of the essential purposes of art, and stand-up comedy represents one of its most radical forms. Its deepest function is not simply to provoke laughter but to offer audiences a release from the psychological pressures of contemporary mass society. What ultimately generates laughter is not the joke itself, but the audacity of articulating what many people think yet would never dare to say aloud.

Are there two or three books that, when it comes to addressing any of the themes fuelling my own philosophical and literary production, you would describe as true "classics" and advise the reader to familiarise themselves with—the way, say, Plato's Republic or Machiavelli's Prince can be said to be "classics" in politics? And are there any books published over the past ten years that you would equally recommend to those readers who are interested in such themes?

Among the books I would consider essential are Alessandro Fullin's Come fidanzarsi con un uomo senza essere una donna (How to Date a Man Without Being a Woman), David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day, Groucho Marx's Groucho and Me, Devorah Baum's The Jewish Joke, David Bezmozgis's Natasha and Other Stories, and Howard Jacobson's Mother's Boy.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. There are several other works that I have deliberately set aside, as I intend to discuss them in my forthcoming research on humour as a driving force in the postmodern transformation of literary genres.

An article (in Italian) on La Repubblica about Daniel de Lucia: https://roma.repubblica.it/cronaca/2013/12/20/news/roma_universit_lgbt_premio_maria_baiocchi-74135305/