Felix Delbruck wrote:

>To make a not necessarily helpful generalization here: the English are
>sex maniacs, whereas the Germans have an anal fixation.  In other words:
>German humour and coarse language seem to me to tend more towards the
>scatological, whereas English smut focuses on sex.  ...

I agree with you, Felix: yet interesting, these generalizations are not
very helpful.  Inferences about a general aspect of a people, even if
corrects, can't be extended to any individual specifically - it's a
statistical principle.

Mozart's scatological humor could be "explained" for a lot of theories,
from social class, language or disturb on anal phase etc., etc., etc.  But
I think that there is no theory that can really explain his personality (or
any one's) without a certain philistines - a pretension of scientists.  If
you read Mozart's letters and all their scatollogies, if you read Rabelais'
"Gargantua e Pantagruel" and if you read Joyce's letters you will see three
very different kinds of scatology, of three very different men, of three
very different countries (Austria, France and Ireland) of three very
different times (centuries XVIII, XV and XX) writing in three very
different languages (Deutsche, French and English) and living in three very
different social environments (except Joyce, a solipsist).  That's enough,
in my judgement, to avoid any kind of scientific approach to that meter
that explains scatology using these elements of just one item (German
Language, for example).  A good explanation, cannot have as 'independent
variable' any one of, at least, the variables I wrote above (Century,
social life, for example), or it will not explain the own variability
inside it (Deutsche-French, Solipsist-MiddleClass).

About the three kinds (here) of scatology, if fact - as you wrote about
English humor-, Joyce's one (that wrote in English) seem to be the most
"sexual-perverted" one, yet his humor is not British, like a Thakeray or
a Evelyn Waugh one.  Joyce liked to practice anal sex with his wife - Nora
Barnacle - as we can see in his letters; it was a sexual preference his
scatology.  Rabelais' one is just Bizarre, because the Human Sense is
completely lost - that doesn't happen with Joyce or Mozart - pushing men
to bestiality.

Mozart's scatological humor seems to me just a child humor.  Pure
infantility.  Children from 5 to 10 years old like - and laugh a lot -
with jokes that use obscene words like shit, but, nose caca or farding...
His letters to his familiars are not only scatological, but also full of
funny drawings and with things written up-side-down or in the margin areas,
making circles - some biographies or musical encyclopedias bring pictures
of these manuscripts that you can see well.  Another point is that his
letters had, moreover scatology and funny drawings, a lot of pornography,
jokes, nicknames for his 'enemies' and other things among which scatology
is, in my opinion, just one more item of a more generic aspect.  All these
things show us a very informality of Mozart.  He was an 'child-adult'
person, in many aspects; with a light soul - like children - and like
to make "unresponsable" things like use badwords and make folly things;
parties, drinking, snooker (he wrote many of his pieces over a snooker
table, and that is in the film Amadeus, too) - he even agreed with a comic
version of his Don Giovanni.  This becomes more natural to believe when
we see that so many persons that had an oppressive father become a bit
"child-adults" when grow up, full of kindness and lightness.  Mozart
seems to be one of these.  Maybe this insubordination to a conventional
behavior is a mechanism of compensation against the patterns of paternal
authority.That eternal-childhood doesn't mean immaturity, necessarily, and
more many times Mozart showed to have maturity.  His last works show the
main aspects of his late personality.  The fear of God and the punishmentt
of his sins in the Requiem; serenity before death on his Clarinet Conc.(2
mov), peace with the figure of his dead father on La Clemenza di Tito and
the same childhood, the same lightness in The Magic Flute.

I hope you could understand, at least, what I tried to say.  difficult
to say these things out of our natural language.But, IMO, to have his
scatological jokes as a specific pathology is to ignore all the other
aspects of his personality and his "way of life" in which these jokes
are insured.

Best Regards,

Renato Vinicius