The Comic Underworld

I. Undermining the Genre’s Expectations

The American mafioso, from The Godfather to Goodfellas, is a figure built for menace: even at his most charming, he carries the threat of violence as a permanent undertone, and a story that introduces such a figure typically uses him, eventually, to deliver on that threat. James Mulhern’s recurring mafia-adjacent character, Mr. Scarfone, is introduced through precisely this genre expectation and then, scene by scene, made to violate it almost entirely. Molly’s roommate Ashley invokes the genre directly on their first meeting, asking, with visible anxiety, whether Molly knows anyone in the Mafia, prompted by her parents’ love of The Godfather.¹ Molly’s answer is a small essay in itself on how her own family experiences the figure Ashley fears: “One of my Nonna’s friends, Mr. Scarfone, has ties to the Mafia. He’s involved in small-time things like gambling, money laundering, and drugs. Nothing major. He doesn’t smash horse heads onto bedposts… If you met Mr. Scarfone, you would like him. He seems like a nice old uncle. He tells stupid jokes, but he’s always smiling and kind.”¹

This essay takes Molly’s characterization as the story cycle’s actual thesis about Scarfone rather than as a naive granddaughter’s misjudgment the plot will later correct. Unlike the classic gangster narrative, in which a sympathetic introduction to a mob figure exists to be undercut by a later revelation of violence, Mulhern’s fiction never delivers that revelation. Scarfone remains, from his first appearance to his last, exactly as advertised: comic, generous, mildly ridiculous, and completely loyal to Nonna and her family.

II. Domestic Integration: The Mobster at the Family Table

Scarfone’s menace is systematically domesticated by placing him inside precisely the family rituals — graduation parties, casual visits, running jokes about Nonna’s romantic life — that define belonging throughout Mulhern’s fiction. He is present at Molly’s graduation party not as an intimidating outsider but as a beloved fixture of the family’s social world, delivering a congratulatory toast “pulling a paper from an inside pocket of his black jacket” with the visible nervousness of a man unused to public speaking, prompting Nonna’s affectionate needling: “Look who’s smart now. You gotta read from a paper.”² The scene’s comedy depends entirely on the reader accepting Scarfone as a fully integrated family member whose criminal reputation is common knowledge and a source of running jokes rather than fear: Molly’s father needles Nonna about “that shady character next to you,” and “Mr. Scarfone laughed, brushing a hand under his chin and flicking it forward. Many of the guests chuckled”² — the gesture (a classically Italian, mock-threatening flick of the chin) performed for comic effect precisely because everyone present understands it as theater rather than genuine menace.

Nonna and Scarfone’s romantic relationship extends the domestication further, converting the figure of organized-crime menace into the figure of a slightly disreputable but devoted boyfriend, discussed by Nonna in the same bawdy, affectionate register she uses for every other subject in her life: “Oh, he’s just a good fuck… And you should see the size of his cazzone.”³ The essay on profanity as intimacy elsewhere on this site identifies this register as Nonna’s characteristic mode of expressing trust and affection; that Scarfone receives the identical treatment as any other beloved family figure confirms that, within the story cycle’s own internal logic, he has been fully absorbed into the family’s emotional economy, indistinguishable in narrative function from any non-criminal relative.

III. The One Moment of Genuine Menace

The story cycle permits itself exactly one scene in which Scarfone’s underlying capacity for real menace becomes visible, and the essay argues its rarity is precisely what gives it force. At the same graduation party, moments after his comic toast, Scarfone puts his hands on Molly’s shoulders and says, “almost menacingly,” “If you ever need anything, and I mean anything… call me.”² The adverb is doing exactly the essay’s central work: Mulhern allows the reader, for one sentence, to remember what kind of man Scarfone actually is, before the scene moves on and the comic register reasserts itself. The line functions as a kind of Chekhov’s gun that the story cycle never fires directly — Molly does not, in the stories collected here, call in this favor for anything resembling the implied violence — but does, crucially, exploit an adjacent form of the same offer: Scarfone’s practical usefulness as a source of illegal substances.

“Mia Bambina” converts Scarfone’s comic, avuncular criminal reputation into the actual mechanism of Ashley’s murder, and does so without ever staging Scarfone himself as complicit in any dramatic sense: “Obtaining cocaine from Mr. Scarfone, the mobster friend of my grandmother’s, was easy.”⁴ The sentence is remarkable for its total lack of ceremony — no scene, no dialogue, no negotiation is dramatized, only the flat statement that the transaction was “easy,” which is possible only because the story cycle has spent an entire preceding volume establishing Scarfone as harmless, familiar, and completely trusted. The comic underworld the story has built around him is precisely what makes his criminal utility invisible until the exact moment Molly needs it.

IV. Comedy as Camouflage for Consequence

Read alongside the essay on this site treating the comic-grotesque tradition, Scarfone represents a distinct but related technique: where that essay traces scenes that pivot from comedy to violence within a single moment, Scarfone’s function is to remain comic in every single scene in which he appears, while quietly supplying the material infrastructure — the cocaine, the implied capacity for violence, the underworld connections — for a violence the story locates entirely off page and entirely within Molly’s own actions. Scarfone is never made to answer for his role in Ashley’s death because the narrative never asks him to; he is simply a nice old uncle who happened to have access to something Molly needed, exactly as advertised from his first appearance. This is, this essay argues, Mulhern’s most elegant use of genre subversion in the corpus: a mafioso who is never once permitted to be frightening becomes, without a single scene of intimidation, indispensable to a murder, precisely because comedy, not menace, is what made him trustworthy enough to ask.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays The Comic-Grotesque Tradition Profanity as Intimacy