13. Humor as Resistance: Rude Humor - Commedia Dell'Arte

What do a sixteenth century Italian clown, a Nobel Prize-winning playwright, and a man who threw a Subway sandwich at a federal agent have in common? They are all practitioners of one of the oldest and most enduring forms of political humor: rude humor aimed at upsetting the powerful.

In this episode, I trace that tradition back to the market squares of Renaissance Italy and commedia dell'arte — where the clever servant Arlecchino regularly upended the normal social hierarchy by systematically humiliating his pompous master Pantalone in front of crowds of ordinary workers. 

The commedia tradition found its strongest modern expression in the Italian jester Dario Fo, who performed in occupied factories, public parks, and town squares. Like Arlecchino before him, Fo confronted the validity of oppressive hierarchies — and as a result was prosecuted forty times on charges of blasphemy and subversion. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997.

The episode explores a question that runs through the entire Humor as Resistance series: what makes rude humor politically effective? When does it crack open the assumptions of the powerful and lead to real change? And when does it simply make people laugh and send them home, leaving the hierarchy exactly as it found it?

The answer has less to do with the quality of the humor and more with the social context in which it is performed.

Transcript

HUMOR AS RESISTANCE #3 -  RUDE HUMOR 

INTRODUCTION

Hi. This is Michael C. Patterson. Welcome to the Flourish In Times of Struggle podcast. This is the third in a series of episodes exploring humor as a tool of resistance - and as a means of maintaining our sanity. This episode explores a form of comedic protest I'll call rude humor.

Let's start with a recent example.

THE MOLOTOV HOAGIE

In August 2025, federal Customs and Border Protection agents had been deployed to the streets of Washington DC — occupying the nation's capital. The citizens of DC were outraged.

Sean Dunn was one of those outraged citizens. A Justice Department employee, he had just purchased a Subway sandwich when he came upon a group of CBP officers looming on a street corner. Unable to contain himself any longer, he faced them. He called them fascists. He shouted "Why are you here? I don't want you in my city!" And then he threw the sandwich at one of them, hitting the officer squarely in the chest. Then he turned and ran.

I imagine this scene playing out like a Keystone Kops movie — Dunn skipping around corners like Charlie Chaplin, holding on to his bowler hat, the heavily armed officers of the federal government lumbering in pursuit of the sandwich assailant.

The authorities were not amused. Dunn was caught and arrested. The Attorney General fired him and announced felony charges. The comedy might have ended there — but the Attorney General pushed the event back into the realm of the ridiculous by calling Dunn "an example of the Deep State." The hurling of molotov hoagies at federal agents — Ah, yes. A classic Deep State operation.

A grand jury refused to indict. Come on! The case went to trial on misdemeanor assault. The jury acquitted. Come on! Even the agents who had been threatened by the flying sandwich seemed to appreciate the humor — they reportedly gave each other plush sandwich toys and patches reading "felony footlong."

Within days, anonymous posters depicting a protester hurling a sandwich had been slapped on walls across Washington DC — without permission, using homemade flour-and-water glue, following a long tradition of unauthorized political messaging.

The humorless federal government had prosecuted a sandwich. And lost face because of it.

The real-life event had all the elements of a slapstick comedy routine — and something older than slapstick. A single individual, armed with nothing but a footlong hoagie, stands up to a heavily armed group of authority figures, humiliates them, and runs like crazy through the streets of the capital. This is one of the oldest comic archetypes in human history: the lone fool who punctures the dignity of power and gets away with it. The clever servant outrunning the pompous master. The jester deflating the king. Rude humor aimed upward — at the pretensions of those who take themselves too seriously — is as old as the first person who noticed that the emperor had no clothes and said so out loud, in public, loudly enough to be heard.

Look at what was arrayed against Sean Dunn that night. Bullet-proof vests. Helmets. Gun holsters. Back-up ammunition. The full ceremonial apparatus of federal enforcement, designed to project overwhelming force and pre-emptive fear. All of it — every ounce of it — deployed against a man with a sandwich.

These were probably not highly trained special forces operatives. These were hastily deployed agents, many with questionable credentials and minimal preparation, staggering under the weight of equipment they had barely learned to wear. All that hardware. All that pageantry of power. And still — completely unprepared for a threat their training had never anticipated: a footlong hoagie traveling at speed.

Picture them in pursuit. The helmets. The vests. The holsters banging against their hips as they ran. The full absurd weight of the security state, lumbering down the streets of the nation's capital after a man with mayonnaise on his hands.

The overreaction was funnier than the original act. The apparatus defeated itself.

And it didn't stop with Sean Dunn. The anonymous posters that appeared overnight across the city — slapped up without permission in the long tradition of people's political art — turned a single moment of magnificent frustration into a shared symbol of outrage and resistance. Anyone with flour, water, and a printer could participate. No stage required. No ticket. No permission from anyone.

 RUDE HUMOR - COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE

Picture a market square in northern Italy, sometime in the sixteenth century. A traveling theater company has set up a makeshift stage. No ticket required. No theater building. No separation between the performance and the life of the street.

A pompous old merchant — Pantalone — struts onto the stage, boasting of his wealth, his wisdom, his God-given superiority. He is obviously a fool. Everyone can see it. And then his servant enters — Arlecchino, the trickster, dressed in a patchwork costume of multicolored diamond shapes, moving with the physical genius of a trained acrobat. Arlecchino is poor. Arlecchino is powerless. Arlecchino is the cleverest person on the stage.

What follows is a comedy of systematic humiliation. The master is exposed as vain, greedy, and stupid. The servant turns out to be the one with genuine intelligence, genuine resourcefulness, genuine humanity. The social hierarchy is inverted — physically, hilariously, in front of ordinary people who live under exactly that hierarchy every day.

This is commedia dell'arte. And the argument it makes is revolutionary. The social hierarchy is not based on merit. The people at the top are not there because they are smarter, wiser, or more divinely favored. Pantalone is the fool. The servant has the wisdom. And if that is true — if the people at the bottom of the hierarchy are more resourceful, more perceptive, more fully human than the people at the top — then the entire ideological justification for the hierarchy is called into question. At least in the minds of the workers watching from the square.

Commedia emerged in mid-sixteenth century Italy, performed by professional traveling companies in public squares and marketplaces. The performers included women, at a time when women were excluded from most theatrical performance.

STOCK CHARACTERS

Rather than creating original characters for each performance, commedia companies used stock characters — a fixed set of recognizable types that audiences encountered again and again across different performances and different companies. The pompous Doctor. The miserly Pantalone. The boastful Captain. And the zanni — the clown-servant figures, from whom the English word "zany" derives. These were not fully rounded individuals. They were social types — exaggerated embodiments of recognizable roles in the social hierarchy.

And crucially, the stock characters described that hierarchy from the perspective of those at the bottom rather than the top. The masters were always vain, greedy, and foolish. The servants were always resourceful, clever, and clear-eyed. This was people's art: it told the story of the social order from the point of view of the people who did the work and bore the weight of it.

Stock characters are, by their nature, stereotypes — exaggerated types used to mock a recognizable group of people. Which raises an uncomfortable question: what makes one kind of mockery acceptable and another not?

The answer lies in the direction of the mockery and what it does to the social hierarchy. When stereotypes are deployed top-down — the powerful mocking the powerless — they further alienate an already oppressed group and reinforce the existing order. When stereotypes are deployed bottom-up — those at the bottom targeting those at the top — they disrupt the hierarchy and argue for greater equity. The device is the same. The moral and political function is opposite.

Commedia's stock characters were bottom-up stereotypes. The pompous master was always the fool. The clever servant was always the one who saw clearly. The mockery was aimed upward at the powerful — not downward at the vulnerable. That distinction runs through the entire tradition of rude humor and is the line that separates liberation from oppression.

IMPROVISATION

The performances were largely improvised within loose plot outlines — performers responded to the specific audience in front of them, incorporated local topical references, adjusted to the mood of the crowd. 

Improvisation itself is a form of resistance — to the authority of the fixed text, the single author, the predetermined meaning. It is democratic, distributing creative decision-making among performers and audience. 

Commedia's tradition runs forward through Molière's valets who outmaneuver their aristocratic employers, through Beaumarchais's Figaro — whose Marriage of Figaro so threatened the French aristocracy that Louis XVI tried to ban it. Commedia finds its most explicit modern heir in the Italian playwright and clown, Dario Fo.

DARIO FO

Dario Fo was an Italian playwright, director, actor, and mime writing and performing from the late 1950s through the 1990s. During that period, Italy was riven by political violence, labor conflict, and what became known as the strategy of tension — a period in which the Italian state used violence to discredit the left — including false flag operations: bombings and other violent acts carried out by the state or its allies and blamed on those who opposed them.. 

He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997. When he received it, he opened his Nobel lecture by praising the committee for having the guts to award the prize to 'someone who is considered a jester.' Fo was unapologetic about his provocative agenda — and he applauded the Nobel committee for recognizing it and rewarding it. His intent was never merely to amuse. It was to provoke — to produce the kind of cognitive disruption that forces a new way of seeing, that dislodges the audience from its habitual frame and makes the official narrative impossible to maintain.

Fo performed not in conventional theaters for comfortable audiences but in occupied factories — workplaces taken over by striking workers — in sports arenas, prisons, and community centers. The venue was part of the argument. Art belongs to everyone. It should be as natural and necessary as conversation, as embedded in daily life as work and food and struggle. Not a refined product consumed by those with the education and money to appreciate it — but a living expression of the lives of ordinary people, performed in the spaces where ordinary people actually live.

The theater company joined the labor action by performing inside it. The performance and the politics were inseparable. For Fo, that inseparability was the point. Rude humor is people's humor — it belongs in the factory, the prison yard, the street corner. The moment it moves into the concert hall and charges admission, it has already begun to betray its purpose.

ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF AN ANARCHIST

His most famous play, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, illustrates the method precisely. In 1969, an Italian railway worker named Giuseppe Pinelli died after falling from a police station window while being interrogated about the Piazza Fontana bombing — a terrorist attack that killed seventeen people and that subsequent investigations strongly suggested was a false flag operation carried out by neo-fascist groups with connections to the Italian security services. Pinelli had nothing to do with it. The police claimed his death was suicide. Most people suspected murder. Fo's response was a farce.

The central character — the Maniac — is a serial impersonator who infiltrates the police station posing as the judge overseeing the investigation. He examines the official account with the tone of absolute seriousness — and devastating comic precision. The police claimed Pinelli threw himself from the window. The Maniac simply asks the obvious questions. Who opened the window at midnight in December when the temperature was below zero? Why was it open at all? And how did a man exhausted after nearly three days of illegal detention manage to reach a window set so high off the floor that he would have needed a leg up to get there? Each question is asked with perfect mock-seriousness. Each answer the police offer creates a new problem. 

The Maniac incorporates each new version cheerfully and shows how it makes things worse. He is Arlecchino in a police station — the clever outsider deploying precise logical analysis against a lie held together by institutional power rather than evidence..

FO'S ARRESTS

Fo was prosecuted by the Italian state on more than forty occasions — charged variously with blasphemy, obscenity, defaming the police, and subversion. He was arrested for refusing to allow police officers into his performances. His theater was firebombed. The Vatican denounced his television work as the most blasphemous show in the history of television. The United States barred him from entering the country. Each act of suppression confirmed the jester's argument: the institutions that claimed to serve the people were using every tool available to silence the man who sided with the workers and exposed their oppression.

CONCLUSION

The tradition running from Arlecchino to Dario Fo is not a museum piece. It is a living argument — one that has been made independently, in different forms, wherever ordinary people have lived under a hierarchy in which a small elite exploits the labor of the many, concentrates wealth and power in their own hands, and then insists that this arrangement is natural, inevitable, and divinely ordained. The argument of the clever servant cuts through that insistence every time: Pantalone is the fool. The servant has the wisdom. The hierarchy is not based on merit. It is based on power — and power can be questioned, mocked, and ultimately dismantled.

Dario Fo understood that taking the argument out of the theater and into the spaces where ordinary people actually live was itself a political act. 

In our next episode we follow that impulse further — into the streets, the protest marches, and the city walls of communist Poland — and ask a harder question: when does rude humor actually change anything? When does it produce genuine resistance? And when does it simply release the pressure that might have forced a real correction, leaving the powerful exactly where they were?