In the chapter “Foreigners are Funny – the Ethicity and Ethnicity of Humor” in his book “On Humor“, Simon Critchley talks about how in ethnic humour “the ethos of a place is expressed by laughing at people who are not like us, and usually believed to be either excessively stupid or peculiarly canny” and that “the belief is that ‘they’ are inferior to ‘us’ or at least somehow disadvantaged because ‘they’ are not like ‘us’” (p. 69): he then argues that this happens between people of the same country, such as between England and Scotland.
Critchley’s thesis on ethnic humor made me think of the rivalry and complex relationship between people from Northern and Southern Italy: many people from Northern Italy, for example, think their compatriots from Southern Italy are stupid, uncultured and lazy. The first example of this “feud” that came to my mind is a scene from the italian film Three Men and a Leg (Tre Uomini e una gamba, Massimo Venier, Aldo Baglio, Giovanni Storti and Giacomo Poretti, 1997): this scene (3:16-7:01) shows Count Dracula as a person from Southern Italy trying to pretend he is from Northern Italy. The funniest aspect here is that he even tries to speak these peasant’s dialect but they can clearly tell he is not from around there so they decide to test him with the “cadrega” trick: the word “cadrega” means chair in their dialect but since he is from Southern Italy he does not know that and thinks that a “cadrega” is an apple.
Just like Critchley says, humour can “equally put one back in one’s place with the anxiety, difficulty and, indeed, shame of where one is from” (p. 74): this is what happens here with the character of “Brambilla Fumagalli”, which is clearly a made up name because he is afraid they will understand where he is from if he tells them what his real name is.
Your example made me think of another film with a similar theme Welcome to the Sticks (French: Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis) where the character moves from southern France to Northern France and can beraly understand the dialect in which people talk there. Most of the jokes in the film are based on the characters’ constant misunderstanding of each other’s words.
I think this highlights really well how humour is even more specific than just a broad national context. Your example is particularly interesting to me though, as it seems you have to have some awareness of both the Southern and the Northern Italian context to understand the joke, which is perhaps an even more specific and detailed knowledge.