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 treats Molly’s characterization as a useful guide to Scarfone rather than as a naive granddaughter’s misjudgment the plot will later correct. Unlike many gangster narratives, in which a sympathetic introduction to a mob figure is undercut by a later revelation of violence, Mulhern’s fiction does not appear to deliver that revelation. Scarfone remains broadly as Molly describes him: comic, generous, mildly ridiculous, and 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 includes one scene in which Scarfone’s capacity for menace becomes visible. 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 briefly reminds the reader what kind of man Scarfone may be before the scene returns to a comic register. The line can be read as a planted possibility, though the story cycle does not use it for the implied violence: Molly does not, in the stories collected here, call in this favor for anything resembling it. The later story does, however, make use of Scarfone’s access to illegal substances.

“Mia Bambina” makes Scarfone’s comic, avuncular criminal reputation part of the mechanism of Ashley’s murder without staging Scarfone himself as knowingly complicit: “Obtaining cocaine from Mr. Scarfone, the mobster friend of my grandmother’s, was easy.”⁴ The sentence offers no scene, dialogue, or negotiation, only the flat statement that the transaction was “easy.” The earlier presentation of Scarfone as familiar and trusted helps explain why his criminal utility is not foregrounded until Molly needs it.

IV. Comedy as Camouflage for Consequence

Read alongside the essay on this site treating the comic-grotesque tradition, Scarfone suggests a distinct but related technique: where that essay traces scenes that pivot from comedy to violence within a single moment, Scarfone remains largely comic while supplying material connections — cocaine, an implied capacity for violence, and underworld contacts — for violence located off page and within Molly’s actions. Scarfone is not made to answer for his role in Ashley’s death because the narrative does not show him knowing of it; he is presented as an older family friend who happens to have access to something Molly needs. The arrangement may be read as a use of genre expectations in which a mafioso who is rarely frightening becomes connected to a murder because comedy, rather than menace, has made him approachable.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays The Comic-Grotesque Tradition Profanity as Intimacy