Humor as Resistance - Carnival and Street Theater

Continuing the series on humor as resistance, dissent, and liberation, this episode explores what happens when the Dionysian impulse takes to the streets. Freed from the confines of a performance space, the separation between performer and observer dissolves. Performance, provocation, and protest become inseparable. The comedy becomes the political act of liberation.

In this episode I follow the tradition of rude humor as it spills out of the theater into the protest march, the city park, the union hall, and the walls of the city. I begin with two vivid examples of agitprop: the Bread and Puppet Theater appearing with their twenty-foot papier-mâché giants at protest marches across sixty years of American political life, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe performing without permission in public parks — winning an Obie Award in 1967 for "unifying theater and revolution and grooving in the parks."

This opens into a broader tradition: the carnival. From Rio de Janeiro's Carnival to the Mardi Gras of New Orleans, carnival is the ancient popular form in which the normal social order is temporarily suspended, mocked, and turned upside down. The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin spent years in Soviet exile studying this tradition and identified its key characteristics: the dissolution of the boundary between performer and audience, the inversion of the social hierarchy from the bottom up, the misalliance of the sacred and the profane, and the profanation that strips the costume from power and reveals the ordinary human being underneath.

But the episode also raises a difficult question that runs through this entire series: when does carnival produce genuine resistance — and when does it simply release the pressure that might have forced real change, leaving the hierarchy exactly as it found it? The Feast of Fools and the Roman Saturnalia suggest the danger. Poland's Orange Alternative — the absurdist resistance movement that painted grinning dwarves on communist city walls — suggests the possibility. The difference, I argue, lies not in the quality of the humor but in the structure and strategy of the movement that surrounds it.

Transcript

CARNIVAL & STREET THEATRE

In our last episode we traced the tradition of rude humor from the market squares of sixteenth century Italy to the occupied factories of 1970s Milan — from Arlecchino outrunning Pantalone to Dario Fo being prosecuted on forty counts of blasphemy and subversion for the crime of telling the truth in public. We followed the clever servant tradition through Molière, through Beaumarchais, through the Nobel Prize-winning jester who understood that taking the argument out of the theater and into the spaces where ordinary people actually live was itself a political act.

In this episode we follow that impulse further — out of the theater entirely, into the streets, the protest marches, and the city walls.

We will encounter a Russian literary theorist who spent years in Soviet exile developing a framework for understanding a specific and ancient form of popular expression: the carnival. Not just street performance or rude humor generally — but carnival specifically, with its own characteristics, its own energy, and its own political possibilities.

And we will use that framework to ask the question that underlies not just carnival but all forms of humor as resistance: when does it serve as genuine resistance — cracking open the assumptions of the powerful and helping build the movement that can replace them? And when does it simply release the pressure that might have forced real change, leaving the hierarchy exactly as it found it?

Carnival raises this question in its sharpest form. But the question applies to every joke, every satire, every act of rude humor aimed at power — including the ones we have been developing in this series.

THEATER IN THE STREETS

The Bread and Puppet Theater, founded in 1963 by the German immigrant Peter Schumann, carries the same impulse into a different form — the carnivalesque infused directly into organized protest. Their instrument is the giant puppet: papier-mâché figures sometimes twenty feet high, depicting the powerful and the powerless in visual tableaux of extraordinary force. A skeletal figure in a suit representing corporate greed. A towering effigy of a politician reduced to grotesque absurdity by sheer scale. A massive dove held aloft by dozens of hands at an antiwar march. 

Bread and Puppet has marched alongside the Vietnam War protest movement, the nuclear disarmament movement, and every major mobilization of the American left for sixty years. The giant puppet in the protest march and the frog suit at the ICE detention facility in Portland — which spread from there to No Kings marches across the country — are expressions of the same impulse across sixty years: the grotesque body deployed against the pretensions of official authority.

At every performance, Schumann bakes sourdough rye bread himself and distributes it free with garlic aioli. The name itself encodes the philosophy: Bread and Puppet; art should be as basic to life as bread. The sharing of bread is an act of embodied generosity — feeding people, meeting a basic need, saying with action rather than words that the body matters, that the people gathered here are real and present and worthy of care. Schumann described what made the street performances work: people wanted to protest, but all they knew was how to print a leaflet. Bread and Puppet said: you can do much more. Come and join us. Make the revolution irresistible.

The San Francisco Mime Troupe has been performing free political comedies in city parks since 1959 — in the explicit commedia tradition, using exaggerated stock characters and topical political scripts, with no admission charge. They won an Obie Award in 1967 for "unifying theater and revolution and grooving in the parks." Their mission: to create theater that presents a working-class analysis of events that shape our society, exposes social and economic injustice, and demands revolutionary change on behalf of working people — with artistry and humor.

These forms did not evolve from one another in a neat historical sequence. Throughout history, wherever ordinary people have lived under concentrated power that they experience as unjust and absurd, this kind of humor has emerged independently — in different cultures, different centuries, different forms. What they share is more important than any historical connection: performance in accessible spaces, physical comedy that refuses to be dignified when dignity is a mask for power, stock  characters that target the behaviors and pretensions of the powerful rather than the identity of the vulnerable, and the consistent political argument of the clever servant — the hierarchy is not natural, not meritocratic, not divinely ordained.

It is the same argument Howard Zinn made in A People's History of the United States — the recognition that the same history sounds completely different when told from the perspective of those who did the work rather than those who owned it. Commedia's Arlecchino is Zinn's approach in theatrical form: here is the social order as it looks from the bottom.. This is Michael C. Patterson. Welcome to the Flourish In Times of Str

BAKHTIN AND THE CARNIVALESQUE

In the mid-twentieth century, the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin — writing in internal exile under Stalin, which gives his ideas about popular resistance a particular authority — spent years analyzing exactly this tradition. He called it the carnivalesque, and he developed a framework for understanding what these recurring forms share. It is a useful framework — with a significant limitation we will come to.

His reference point was the medieval carnival — think of Rio's Carnival or New Orleans' Mardi Gras as the most familiar contemporary descendants of the tradition. The overt sexuality and erotic license. The bawdy costumes and unapologetic cross-dressing and gender fluidity. The drunken excess. The people taking over the streets with music and dance and merriment. The Dionysian, Bacchic impulse given full public expression — the things that are normally suppressed, denied, and policed erupting into collective celebration. 

This is not incidental to carnival's political function. It is central to it. The carnival's insistence on the primacy of the body — on pleasure, on desire, on the full range of human experience that official culture sanitizes and suppresses — is itself an argument. The body insists on its reality beneath the robes and the titles and the performance of transcendence. We are all bodies. The emperor too.

Bakhtin identified four shared characteristics of the carnivalesque.

The first and most fundamental: the dissolution of the boundary between performer and audience. The carnival is not a performance that people watch. It is an event that people live. There is no audience in the conventional sense — there are only participants. This is what distinguishes authentic carnival from spectacle. Spectacle maintains the boundary: performers perform, audience watches, nothing changes in the relationship between them. Carnival dissolves the boundary: everyone is both performer and participant, the performance is the collective act of everyone present.

This dissolution is a continuum rather than a binary. Fo performing in an occupied factory still had a stage and an audience — but the factory itself was a political act, and the performance happened inside it. The SF Mime Troupe still has performers and watchers — but the park is free and anyone can stop or leave. Bread and Puppet marching with giant puppets through a protest crowd comes closer to full dissolution — the puppet carriers are protesters, the protesters are performers. 

The Orange Alternative — a Polish resistance movement in the 1980s that used absurdist humor against communist rule — comes closest of all. Activists painted grinning dwarves on city walls and people wore orange dwarf hats in public squares. You were not watching the orange hats. You were wearing one, or you were not. The participation was the political act.

The second characteristic: the inversion of the normal hierarchical order. This is not merely the formal device of turning things upside down. It is a perspective shift — the story of the social order told from the bottom up rather than the top down. Not the official version, sanitized and designed to protect the status quo, but the people's version that shows the mire and muck that is part of the actual reality. The inversion reveals the contingency of the normal arrangement: this is not the only possible world. The autocratic social hierarchy is constructed. It could be otherwise.

The third characteristic: the carnivalistic misalliance — the bringing together of what is normally kept rigorously apart. The sacred and the profane. The political and the erotic. The solemn ceremony of civic life and the unapologetic bawdiness of the body. 

Things the normal order keeps in separate rooms forced suddenly into the same space — and the collision produces shock, laughter, revelation, and — perhaps most importantly — liberation. You weren't supposed to mock the Church. But you did. And nothing happened. God did not strike you dead. The boundary that seemed absolute has been crossed. And once crossed, it can be crossed again.

The fourth characteristic: profanation — To profane means to treat something sacred with irreverence and disrespect. Power depends on ceremony. The uniform, the title, the ritual, the solemn apparatus of official dignity — all of it is designed to make those in power seem different in kind from the rest of us. Above us. Beyond question. Profanation strips away the costume of authority to reveal the ordinary human being underneath. 

Carnival refuses to be awed.  The person wearing that uniform defecates. The priest has desires. The federal agent chasing a sandwich through the streets of Washington DC is as ridiculous as anyone else on that street. Profanation is the act of saying so out loud — in public, through laughter, in a way that cannot be unseen. The pretension to transcendence is a performance. The terrible Wizard of Oz is but a small man behind a curtain manipulating bells and whistles. Carnival exposes the performance. And once the costume is off, it is very hard to put back on convincingly.

Bakhtin's framework captures something real and important about the carnivalesque tradition specifically — about what commedia, Fo, Bread and Puppet, the frog suit, and the penis costume in Fairhope Alabama all share. The dissolution of the boundary between performer and audience. The inversion of the hierarchy from the bottom up. The misalliance that produces shock, laughter, revelation, and liberation. The profanation that strips the costume from power and reveals the ordinary human being underneath. These are the mechanisms by which carnival does its political work. But the framework has a significant limitation — one that the history of carnival makes impossible to ignore

 WHAT MAKES THE DIFFERENCE?

Not all carnival is politically liberating. This is the honest qualification that Bakhtin himself was reluctant to make — and that the history of carnival makes impossible to ignore.

The Feast of Fools — the annual medieval festival in which the lower clergy elected a mock bishop, performed liturgical parody, and briefly elevated a peasant to the symbols of Church authority — was genuine in its resentment and real in its mockery. And then the next morning it was over. The mock pope returned to his station. The real hierarchy resumed. 

The structure and authority of the Church was not only unquestioned but arguably reinforced: you may play the pope for a day, but you return to your God-given station in the morning. The chaos reverted to order. The reversion was itself the message. The carnival of inversion made the permanent hierarchy feel inevitable. 

The Roman Saturnalia — in which slaves feasted with masters and social roles were temporarily reversed — operated the same way. It was not a path toward abolition. It was a mechanism for making slavery more tolerable. The master who ate with his slave for one day could feel he was not a cruel man — and could return to the permanent cruelty of the institution with his conscience partially eased. The same dynamic operated in the American South, where slaveholders permitted certain holiday celebrations as temporary relaxations of the normal rules. The temporary humanity of the relationship insulated the permanent inhumanity of the institution from full moral reckoning.

This is the release valve problem. The carnival releases the pressure that might have forced a correction. The resentment that might have organized itself into sustained resistance is discharged in a day of licensed mockery. The anger that might have built into a movement is metabolized into laughter. The corrective signal fires — and dissipates without triggering the correction.

The question is: what makes the difference between carnival as release valve and carnival as genuine resistance?

"The answer, I think, is structural. The Feast of Fools and the Saturnalia were not embedded in organized resistance movements. They stood alone. There was no movement infrastructure available to leverage the released energy, and no strategy to channel it toward specific demands or concrete change. 

The corrective signal fired — and dissipated into the air. And without that structural grounding, carnival was vulnerable to something worse than irrelevance: co-optation. The energy of popular resentment, with nowhere to go and no movement to direct it, could be absorbed by the very powers it appeared to challenge — licensed, contained, and turned into a tool of social stability rather than social change. The jester serves the king. The Feast of Fools serves the Church. The carnival becomes the safety valve."

Poland's Orange Alternative offers a different model — carnival embedded within a social movement that had both structure and strategy. That movement was Solidarity — the independent trade union that had spent years building an underground resistance infrastructure before the carnivalesque tactics of the Orange Alternative ever appeared on the streets of Warsaw."

I’ll explore the Orange Alternative and describe an hysterical American example in the next episode.