Popular Culture Review Vol. 1, December 1989 | Page 14

dead, on his reappearance, women can no longer see any fascina
tion in his charms.’He is, so to speak, stoned as an imposter. These
two examples among many. I might add that the frequent TV uses
of the legend rarely rise above farce.*
Then there are jokes (“Someone shot the great lover— Yes,
they made a hole in Juan”; or, “H e’s wom out: a wahn Don”),
limericks, other types of humorous poetry, cartoons, and the like.*
It will surely prove more difficult to explain why so apparently
tragic a figure as Don Juan could have from the very start been
couched in comic terms and spawned such myriad comic versions
since. A few observations: Life was hard back in the late medieval
and Renaissance years, for commoners and even for the middle
classes. Tales of lighthearted amorous dalliance would doubtless
have proven enjoyable, worth a chuckle or two. Futhermore, let us
admit it, the legend was, and pretty much still is, told from the male
point o f view (no woman essayed it until George Sand, 1833, though
more have in recent years).* There is something o f m en’s lockerroom braggadocio in the Ur version, by even so churchly a writer
as the priest Tirso himself — a genial expansion o f the dirty joke.*
Older readers may recall the pornographic movies o f their youth (so
unlike those o f today), those nineteen-twenty and -thirty produc
tions that tickled the prurient fancies of former generations. View
ers were allowed vicariously to enjoy fifty-nine minutes of steamy
sex before retribution befell the sinners in the last sixty seconds.
Tirso’s drama and so many of its successors could well have been
playing a similar game. Don Juan sins, the plot seems to approve
(the warnings are really light), the ominous undertone o f reproach
is kept rather muted. Juan, at least, like the moviegoers o f my
youth, scarcely believed in the fact o f eventual payment. But
Tirso’s society and his Church, like our Hays office, demanded it.
That Final minute was a real eye-opener. My own inclination is to
accept this “masculine-slant” explanation: the ribald joy o f male
seduction.

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