Enrico Vaime or the laughter of the Italians. The famous television, theatrical, radio, even cinematographic author of the late twentieth century died in Rome at the age of 85, the one who went hand in hand with Luciano Bianciardi, dictated the lines a Walter Chiari e Paolo Villaggio, duet with Maurizio Costanzo, threw a shy and wiry imitator like Fabio Fazio. Vaime would certainly have found a tranchant joke, a Flaian aphorism, but to define him as a multifaceted and tireless author he would not have been wronged at all. And again: to frame this gentleman here, one of those witty and brilliant men who had experienced the boom of the first post-war period, who had built the foundations of Italian entertainment and television, you had to immediately make room for his irreverent sense of humor.
Happily anchored in the eternal game of the left against the right, Vaime knew how to enrich it with sprinkles of nonsense and that disenchantment with American-style comic culture, of cynical sarcasm deriving from a witty capacity for observation of the other and of society. When he was a boy in Naples, he who was born in Perugia, wrote “pieces of color”, the competition on state TV, a task well done even on Ionesco, three years as a Rai official that are enough and more, and then became one of the external collaborators of the same Rai (“I resigned by vocation, I resigned 14 times, at the 15th public”), Vaime the “free hitter”, that of the cabaret with Franco Fog, he wrote the tracks of at least two of the most viewed, loved and introjected programs as a form of the basic show on TV in at least thirty years to come (the fatal blow to variety will be inflicted by reality and talk shows): Those of Sunday e Canzonissima.
They worked with him Marcello Marchesi, Costanzo in fact, and Italo Terzoli the second (or the first) of the so-called “firm” Terzoli / Vaime. We are in full boom in the sixties of public TV that becomes the verb and mirror of the Italians. Vaime often embroider the lines of Villaggio, Chiari, Paolo Panelli and meanwhile he becomes something of a million dollar man with theatrical musical comedies that he churns out like hot loaves once or twice a year into the late 1980s. The story of the vision of American musicals in the cinema is an obligatory digression. “They bore me to death. In front of Grease I wanted to throw myself under a horse-drawn tram ”(the jokes cannot be explained, but Vaime’s genius lies in that specification on horses ed).
Thus the musical signed by Terzoli / Vaime and loaned to Garinei and Giovannini becomes a one man show with Montesano (Blessed are you), but also a popular and jovial comedy that thrives for entire seasons such as Life begins every morning with protagonist Gino Bramieri. Meanwhile, Vaime is dedicated to what has been the most beloved part of his author’s work: the radio. With Black Out since 1979 on Radio 2 together with Luciano Salce kicks off an entertainment program that collects the insane lesson of Arbore / Boncompagni of High Rating and he mends again the biting dictation, the goliardic mockery, even going so far as to put a young imitator named Fabio Fazio on the payroll. In 1984-85 Vaime (and Terzoli) wrote the lyrics for a Saturday evening variety of Canale 5: Risatissima.
Ric and Gian, Lino Banfi, Gigi and Andrea, Lino Toffolo, Pozzetto, Boldi. Go and retrieve it to understand popular humor just before the great collapse of comedy on TV (“Then the comedians were Walter Chiari, Gino Bramieri, Macario, people who came from the theater. Now they come from holiday villages”). Vaime will also write the Fantastico 88 edition, that of the Montesano-Oxa duo, the last with great ratings, or perhaps even the last before the real serial end of the Saturday night variety. Vaime will write books, will participate as a guest in several TV programs on La7, or he will be a real hilarious one man show, finally he, no longer needing theatrical interpreters, comedians ventriloquists to give voice to, in S’è fatto notte, a delicious late evening program, indeed at night, on Rai1 Maurizio Costanzo, where he played the part of the bartender / waiter with a white tuxedo and a bow tie dangling from his pocket. A few years ago they asked him: “How long have you been afraid of being considered a pensioner?”. And he recalling his friend Flaiano, with whom he wrote and collaborated, putting to good use the lesson of knowing how to make people laugh without thinking for a second: “Basically since I was a child”.
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