Can Dante Take a Joke?

There is an old dinner joke that goes as follows

Heaven Is Where:

The French are the chefs
The Italians are the lovers
The British are the police
The Germans are the mechanics
And the Swiss make everything run on time

Hell is Where:

The British are the chefs
The Swiss are the lovers

The Germans are the police
The French are the mechanics
And the Italians make everything run on time

I personally have always liked this joke, but I wonder what Dante would have thought of it if it had been told at his dinner table after having written The Inferno. Would he have laughed along with his guests, seeing the humor in exposing the relative strengths and weaknesses of different European nations? Or would he mill in fury, retaining that famous scowl of his that we’ve seen in so many paintings. To find out, let’s see how this joke fits in with Dante’s own vision of hell.

Are there any chefs in Dante’s inferno? There aren’t any chefs by trade, though we do have Ugolino, who prepared himself a meal with the flesh of his sons. We also have Alberigo, who served his family a grand meal before slaughtering them all over a land dispute. Neither of these men is British though (they are Italian), so we know that Hell is probably spared from having to eat broiled haddock. As for the lovers, the most prominent one in Dante’s hell is Francesca, who we know was Italian- Dante does place other figures of various nationalities in the second circle, but I don’t believe any of them are Swiss. Again, we have conflict with the joke, which says it is in heaven where the Italians are lovers. There is something of a police force in Dante’s Inferno, if you count the Demons that chased Dante and Virgil, but they certainly weren’t German. Of course, there are no mechanics in the inferno, but if there had been any engineers, they probably would have been among the Greek thinkers in Limbo. And finally, no one makes things run on time in the inferno because time itself is stagnant. So, Dante’s version of the joke would be:

In Hell

The Italians are the chefs

The Italians are the lovers

Demons are the police

The Greeks are the engineers

And nothing runs on time, because there is no time.

The joke, of course, is structured in an entirely different way than Dante’s inferno. Francesca wasn’t sent to hell because she was a particularly bad lover, nor was Ugolino known as a lousy cook. While the joke implies that hell still has some semblance of a normal society, Dante envisions it as a completely different kind of place, a place that we can’t even imagine in terms of our own societal structures. If Dante were to here this joke, then, he would probably just get angry at the trivialization of hell’s misery.

Though, to be fair, British cooking is pretty god awful.