Com toda a certeza, se não for mentira: Mentira e verdade nos folhetos humorísticos de José Daniel Rodrigues da Costa

The ambiguity of humour enables it to disclose the truth behind the fib, the pretence, the deceit. Each one of these synonyms of lies is at work, with its own subtle gradation, in the periodicals edited by José Daniel Rodrigues da Costa. The very notion of lie arouses careful consideration and is called into question in its relationship with truth: “With all certainty, if it is not a lie.” The exaggeration of the fibs with which Da Costa “spices” the truths draws attention to the “hidden truth”, concealed under the cover of social convention, in a dialectic of what is and ought to be, the moral and the amoral, in the border between licit and illicit in the final years of absolutism and the threshold of liberalism. The history of humour, its boundaries and its place in the periodicals of the late 18th and early 19th centuries is one of the many shapes of the history of ideas.