Unpacking the charged cliché of the ‘greedy southern woman’ involves analytical confrontation with some of the many axes of exclusion that characterize Italy, intended as a patriarchal, northern-centric and body-normative society. Furthermore, it involves a critical grasp of the violent modes of visualization that coordinate the exposure of bodies, practices and subjectivities that are considered anomalous within the ideal norms of the nation: on this premise, drawing upon the work of Perera and Feldman, we have previously deployed the concept of ‘scopic regimes’ to describe contemporary Italy. Among other things, our work on Italy as a ‘scopic regime’ briefly suggests that laughter has a crucial function in facilitating audience acceptance and digestion of these violent visualizations. Although not discussed in that publication, this theoretical insight is connected to the Bakhtinian notion of ‘ritual laughter’, intended as a powerful and ambivalent practice that….