Liikaviisas lyö rahoiksi
Pauli Kohelon romaanien inkongruentti komiikka humoristisen suomalaisen kansankuvauksen perinteessä
Abstract
Comedic Techniques and the Finnish Tradition of Folklife Description in Pauli Kohelo’s Novels Ohessa tilinumeroni and Kassan kautta
The history of Finnish literature includes a rich and vivid tradition of folklife description. A signi cant amount of this tradition is humorous by nature. Especially funny is the common character of a thinker whose thoughts are comically folksy and vernacular. In this article, I read two contemporary Finnish novels, Pauli Kohelo’s Ohessa tilinumeroni (“Attached Please Find my Bank Account Number”, 2008) and Kassan kautta (“Through the Checkout”, 2014) as continuators of the Finnish description of folklife. According to my analysis the protagonist and the narrator of these novels, Pauli Kohelo, is a similar kind of character than the protagonists in Maiju Lassila’s Liika Viisas (“Too Wise”, 1915) and Veikko Huovinen’s Havukka-ahon ajattelija (“The inker of Havukka-aho”, 1952; none of these novels are translated into English).
In this article, I use the incongruence theory of humor in order to analyze the comedic techniques used in Kohelo’s novels as well as in previous Finnish descriptions of folklife. My hyphothesis is that Kohelo’s novels represent a postmodern variant of the old tradition. They share many important features with the previous works, especially when it comes to scale, hyperbole and degradation as comedic techniques. en again, especially the meta ctive play with the genre of autofiction and the unreliable narrator distinguish these novels from the older tradition.
