bender

I have it under no authority that Bender the robot of Futurama is based on Остап Бендер  — a Russian character otherwise know as Ostap Bender, or Ostap-Suleyman-Berta-Maria-Bender-Bey or even Bender-Zadunaysky, until his name settled on Ostap Ibragimovich Bender.

Bender, the fictional Russian character, is a con man. Bender in Futurama is a con-artist robot. Bender is an attractive, resourceful crook, full of energy while operating within the law. Bender knew 400 relatively legal ways to make the population part with their money. He is known as "The Great Combinator” which became a catch phrase in the Russian language… I think I made my point, apart from the word “attractive” — though for lady robots, Bender would be a romantic push-over. He’d melt his gear box in two seconds...

This came to me in a dream, and verified by Wikisomething in regard to the Russian character. This is officially cleared by the Ministry of laughter of Soviet rule, 1920-something. Really? Russian Humour is special and needs a special language: Russian and some Vodka. Ask Elon (See: vodka engineered...).

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (Михаи́л Миха́йлович Бахти́н) was a Russian philosopher, literary critic and scholar who worked in literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language. His writings, on a variety of subjects, inspired scholars on different views ranging from Marxism, semiotics, structuralism, religious criticism and disciplines such as literary criticism, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and psychology. Bakhtin was famous for debates on aesthetics and about literature in the 1920s, but forgotten, to be rediscovered by Russian scholars in the 1960s.

Bakhtin was also the philosopher of heteroglossia — the study of diversity of "languages" (meanings and sub-lingos) within a single language — and of carnival on the footsteps of fun and irreverence that gave birth to the tricks and deceptions of Ostap Bender created by Ilf and Petrov, of which Bakhtin was very fond of…

So there. One of the piece of satire, most appreciated by Bakhtin, was written in French, principally by a certain Pierre Pithou, at the end of the 16th century. I know, we’re moving about a lot, but stay with me… 

Imagine your country has been torn apart by religious wars and popular unrest between Catholics and Huguenots. This is the Kingdom of France from 1562 to 1598. 36 bloody years in which the same god is supporting both sides, In which the most atrocious torture and death methods are used, even if the word sadism has not been invented yet, in which the bodies are piling up in the streets. The smell, the threat of pandemic plagues, the sights, the dirt, the sounds of alarms and of victory/defeat trumpets, the sound of occupying (Spanish and Flemish) soldiers' feet on the pavers — a bit like that of the Cybermen in Dr Who — everything would send fear down your spine, unless you question your own will to live, but die anyway you do from hunger… Welcome to Paris… And this was way before the Bastille. Way before Balzac described the torrid squalor of this city, or the commune revolution… and way before 1961 when the Algerians were thrown in the river Seine and drowned because they had not learned to swim… More than 40 official deaths recorded and possibly more than 400… This was way before the revolution of 1968… But we’re getting ahead in looking at the dark past of this beautiful city that lost its crown jewel roof… The Notre-Dame fire...

What attracted Bakhtin was something called La Satyre Ménippée… nothing to do with satyrs (or goat-people) but with sharp and eloquent satire. Quite a few people contributed to the work. 

The Satire Ménippée or La Satyre Ménippée de la vertu du Catholicon d'Espagne was a political and satirical work in prose and verse that mercilessly parodied the Catholic League and Spanish pretensions during the Wars of Religion in France, and championed the idea of an independent but Catholic France. The work was a collaborative effort of various functionaries, lawyers, clerics and scholars. It appeared at a time that coincided with the ascendance of Henry IV of France and the defeat of the League.

The title derives from the classical Greek and Roman literary genre "menippean satire", a form of carnivalesque literature in a free-form mixture of prose, verse and dialogue. Mikhail Bakhtin called the Satyre Ménippée "one of the greatest political satires of world literature”.

Pithou's contribution in one paragraph (Translation by Jules Letambour) is cutting:

O Paris, which is no longer Paris, but a cavern of wild beasts, a citadel of Spaniards, Walloons and Neapolitans, an asylum and safe retreat for thieves, murderers and assassins, will you never feel your dignity and remember who you were, at the cost of what you are! Do you never want to be cured of this frenzy which for a legitimate and gracious King, engendered for you fifty kings and fifty tyrants? Here you are in irons! Here you are in the Spanish Inquisition, a thousand times more intolerable and harder to endure for spirits born free and frank, such as the French nation, than the cruelest deaths of which the Spaniards do know! You could not endure a slight increase in taxes and levies and a few new edicts which did not matter to you at all, and you now endure having your houses plundered, ransomed till you bleed, imprisoning the Senators, hunt and banish your good citizens and councillors, hang them, and kill your principal magistrates! you see it, and you endure it! You not only endure it, but you approve of it, and praise it, and wouldn't dare to do otherwise! You could not support your King, so easygoing, so easy, so familiar, who had become a fellow citizen and bourgeois of your City, which he enriched, which he embellished with sumptuous buildings, adding forts and superb ramparts, a city adorned with honourable privileges and exemptions! What am I saying, could you endure? It’s much worse: you hunted him out of his City, his house, his bed! What hunted? You chased him! What? Pursued? You murdered him, canonised the murderer, and made bonfires of his death! And you see now how much this death has benefited you, because it is the cause that another rose in his place, much more vigilant, much more laborious, much more warrior, and who will know how to hold you tighter, as you have, to your chagrin, already experienced.

In came Henry IV...

Take this, satirists of the world. We’re just amateurs… We need sharper knives...