Ah yes, Dante’s Divine Comedy, the pinnacle of Italian literature in the middle ages and widely considered to be the first narrative poem with large-scale worldbuilding. With that in mind, it’s not good. Bad, even.

The main problem: “Divine Comedy” isn’t a comedy. It’s just not. It’s not that the jokes are bad or unfunny, but they’re just … not there. Nor, for that matter, is anything that could remotely be considered a joke. I know humor has changed drastically over time, but I cannot imagine some Italian nobleman cracking open this bad boy to have a good chuckle. Dante wrote it entirely as a self-insert fanfic where he gets to hang out with his favorite ancient poet and talk to a bunch of saints. God, the saints. Too many of them.

One thing I’d like to point out is that according to Dante’s most esteemed and non-biased view of Hell, Marcus Brutus and Gaius Cassius are in the absolute deepest butthole of Hell right next to Judas Iscariot and LITERAL SATAN for the absolutely heinous crime of killing Julius Caesar, but Caesar, who was pretty much single-handedly responsible for the deaths of some 2 million Gauls and also a known adulterer, gets to chillax for eternity in Heaven. This isn’t meant by Dante to be a joke at all, but it’s still by far the funniest thing in the entire text. I guess Italians just have weird humor.

The Divine Comedy is neither divine nor a comedy. They should call it the Mediocre Unfunny Book instead. I rate this book 3 saints that the protagonists make a full stop to talk to about Jesus or something out of 10. I will now hole myself up in my apartment with the doors locked and the shades down and hope that the ghost of a 700 year old pope doesn’t excommunicate me for insulting peak Catholic literature.