Welcome back to the deep dive. Today we are staring
into a kaleidoscope or maybe it's a funhouse
mirror. That's a good way to put it. We are trying
to unpack the life of a man who embodies what
is maybe the most confusing the most explosive
and just a genuinely difficult contradiction
in modern culture. It really is a contradiction
that I mean If you saw it in a movie strip, you'd
probably send it back. You'd say it was unrealistic.
Exactly. Too on the nose. Right. Because usually,
you know, when we talk about the Nobel Prize
in literature, we have a very specific image
in our heads. Oh, yeah? We picture some somber
novelist, somewhat very serious, probably wearing
tweed, sitting in a leather chair, writing about,
you know, the human condition in very polite,
abstract terms. The canon of high culture. The
establishment patting itself on its own back.
Precisely. But today we're talking about a man
who won that prize in 1997. Yet years earlier,
his work was described by the Cardinal Vicar
of Rome as, and I'm quoting here, the most blasphemous
show in the history of television. Which is quite
an accolade if you really think about it. It's
an award in itself. To go from public enemy number
one of the Vatican to receiving the highest literary
honor on the entire planet. We're talking, of
course, about Dario Fo. And the mission for this
deep dive is really to try and figure out how
those two realities can possibly coexist in one
person. How do you get from slapstick? I mean,
we're talking people falling into machines, circus
performers, literal clowns to this biting political
satire that actually got him banned from the
United States that put him on police watch lists.
It's a journey that forces us to look not just
at the history of 20th century Italy. which is
chaotic enough. Oh, absolutely. But also at the
history of theater itself. Because as we look
at the source material we have here, what becomes
incredibly clear is that Faux wasn't just trying
to be funny. No. He wasn't just a comedian telling
jokes. He was reviving a very specific, very
old, and frankly, a very dangerous tradition
to attack modern power structures. And he wasn't
doing it alone. We absolutely have to talk about
his partner, Frank Aram. And I want to be clear
about this right up front. She wasn't just the
wife. Or the muse. Absolutely not. That would
be a huge misreading of the story. Without Frank
Aram, there is no Dario Fo as we know him. Period.
Their lives were just so intertwined that you
can't talk about one without the other. It's
a story of art, sure, but it's also a story of
kidnappings, of censorship, lawsuits. The literal
bombs going off. It is a turbulent, turbulent
life. And to understand it, I think we have to
start at the very, very beginning. Because Dario
Fo's worldview. didn't start in some sterile
theater academy. It started in a place that sounds
like it was pulled right out of a dark fairy
tale. You're talking about the land of frogs.
Precisely. So let's go back. 1926, Faux is born
in Sangiano in Lombardy in northern Italy. And
just looking at his background, his family, it
feels very eclectic. It doesn't scream future
Nobel laureate. To say the least, his father,
Felice, was a socialist. He was a station master
for the state railway, which meant the family
was constantly on the move, transferring from
station to station all along the Swiss border.
It was a very nomadic existence. So he's growing
up on the move. And his mother, Pina Rodafoe,
she came from a peasant background and she actually
wrote a book called The Land of Frogs about the
area they were from. And the sources mentioned
that his artistic education wasn't formal at
all. He didn't go to some fancy prep school for
acting or writing. No, not at all. He learned
storytelling from his maternal grandfather and
from the locals. The people around him. Yes,
specifically Lombard fishers and these itinerant
glassblowers. This is so crucial. He wasn't learning
the proper. King's Italian from a textbook. He
was absorbing the oral tradition of the working
class. Right. These were people who told stories
not to get a grade, but to entertain each other
after a brutal day of physical labor. Their stories
had to be gripping. They had to land. And there's
one detail about his childhood home, specifically
when they lived in Portobal Travaglia, that I
find absolutely telling. It just feels like it
explains everything about his future work. I
think I know where you're going with this. The
glass -blowing colony. The glass -blowing colony.
So the sources claim that this specific colony
had the highest percentage of insane people in
all of Italy. Now I have to ask, is that a metaphor?
Or is that like an actual statistic? Because
it sounds like an urban legend. It sounds totally
hyperbolic, doesn't it? But the sources suggest
it was quite literal. At the time, the process
of glassblowing involved using arsenic and other
heavy metals. Oh, wow. And the ventilation was...
you know basically non -existent so you had an
entire community of workers suffering from chronic
poisoning neurological damage exactly erratic
behavior hallucinations what was medically termed
back then So he's growing up literally surrounded
by people who are being chemically induced into
what looks like madness. Which, if you think
about the characters Fomalator puts on stage,
the manic energy, the absurdity, these people
living on the absolute margins of reality, it
makes perfect sense. He didn't need to invent
the theater of the absurd. He grew up in it.
He grew up in it. He saw firsthand that madness
was often just a byproduct of your labor conditions,
a consequence of being poor. That's a really
powerful connection. But before we get to his
theater career, we have to address this massive
dark cloud in his biography. The sources call
it the war years controversy. And this is the
shadow that really hangs over everything else.
Right. Because later in life, Dario Fo is the
hero of the Italian left. He's the ultimate anti
-fascist. He is the guy sticking. it to the man
he is the jester of the people but if you actually
look at the records from the 1940s during world
war ii the story gets incredibly murky it's highly
highly contested and we need to treat this like
a forensic investigation because this single
issue defined his relationship with his critics
for the rest of his life okay so let's look at
foe's version first what did he say he did during
the war Faux's narrative, the story he told for
decades, was that during the war, he and his
father were active in the resistance. Okay. He
claimed they helped smuggle Jewish scientists
and escaped Allied soldiers into Switzerland
using the railway. Which tracks, logically. His
dad was a station master right on the border.
If you're going to smuggle people, that's the
place to do it. It makes perfect sense. And regarding
his own military service, Faux claimed that when
he was drafted into Mussolini's army, specifically...
the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, or RSI. Which
was the fascist puppet state set up by the Nazis
in northern Italy after 1943. Yes, the hardcore
fascist remnant. Faux said he deserted almost
immediately. He claimed he wandered the countryside,
sleeping rough, trying to find the partisans
to join up with them. So that's the hero's journey
version. He's a resister, a deserter, but that's
not the only version, is it? No, it's not. And
this is where the deep dive gets very uncomfortable.
In the 1970s, right when Faux was at the absolute
height of his political influence, the right
wing press and his political opponents started
digging. And what did they find? They found testimonies.
And eventually this all went to court in 1979.
These sources, these testimonies suggested he
didn't just get drafted and then run away. No.
They claimed he volunteered for the fascist forces,
specifically for the parachute battalion. He
volunteered. That is a huge difference from I
was drafted and I ran away. A massive difference.
And it gets worse. There are allegations that
he participated in anti -partisan roundups, specifically
the reconquest of the Oslo Valley. Which implies
he was on the ground actively hunting the very
people he later claimed to be aligned with. Exactly.
The resistance fighters. So how did the court
rule on this? Did they prove he was a fascist
volunteer? The court ruling was nuanced, which
is often a polite way of saying damning but legally
complicated. The judge acknowledged that Faux
had indeed served in the RSI and that he had
tried to cover it up later. So he did serve.
Yes. However, because of the broad amnesty laws
that were passed after the war to try and heal
a nation, he wasn't technically guilty of a crime
in the legal sense, but historically. The evidence
strongly suggests he wore that uniform. So why
does this matter so much? I mean, he was a teenager
at the time, right? 18 or 19 years old. It matters
because of the hypocrisy argument. His entire
career, his entire moral authority was built
on calling out others for their pasts, for their
corruption, for their compromises. Right. So
for his enemies, having the gesture of the people
wearing a fascist badge. Even if he later argued
he did it to avoid being shot or to act as a
mole or just out of youthful confusion, it gave
them ammunition for 50 years. Did he ever actually
admit it or did he stick to the I was a partisan
story his whole life? He eventually pivoted his
defense. It became I was a confused boy in a
chaotic time. He argued he joined the anti -aircraft
division thinking he'd be discharged because
they had no ammunition, or that he was trying
to protect his family by not going AWOL immediately.
It's the gray zone of civil war. Yes. And it's
a reminder that history isn't as black and white
as the plays might sometimes suggest. And maybe
it explains the sheer intensity of his later
anti -fascism. It's possible. Sometimes the most
fervent believers are those who have seen the
other side up close, or maybe those who are trying
to outrun their own shadows. So the war ends.
The confused boy survives. He heads to Milan.
And initially, he's not trying to be an actor.
He's studying architecture at the Brera Academy
and the Polytechnic. But he was miserable doing
it. He saw the post -war reconstruction of Milan
as just cheap, impersonal, capitalist architecture.
No soul. He actually had a nervous breakdown
over it. And I love the doctor's advice here.
It's so simple, yet you never hear a doctor say
this anymore. The doctor told him, essentially,
stop studying, stop doing what's making you sick,
do what brings you joy, go be an artist. A prescription
that literally changed the course of 20th country
theater history. He started painting first, but
soon he found the Piccoli -Titra, the small theaters
movement. And this is where he starts doing these
improvised monologues. And it's here that we
have to introduce a concept that is absolutely
fundamental to understanding Dario Faux. If you
take one thing away from this whole deep dive,
it should be this term. Okay, lay it on us. Gramalot.
Gramalot. It sounds like a delicious French dessert.
It is actually a theatrical device. It dates
all the way back to the Middle Ages to the Comedia
dell 'Art. What is it? Gramalot is essentially
a gibberish language. It's a way of speaking
that mimics the rhythm, the cadence, and the
emotional tone of... a real language like French
or English or a rigid political dialect. But
it uses no actual intelligible words. So it's
just nonsense. It's structured nonsense. Faux
would use onomatopoeia, grunts, whistles, sounds,
and these wild physical gestures to convey the
meaning. Okay, but why do that? Why not just
write a script with real words? Two very important
reasons. First... It's hilarious. Seeing someone
speak American technocrat by just making these
harsh barking noises and puffing out their chest,
it instantly highlights how ridiculous that authority
figure is. Okay, I can see that. But secondly,
and much more importantly, evading censorship.
Ah, of course. You can't censor a word that doesn't
exist. Exactly. If the police demanded to see
his script, Faux could hand them a piece of paper
that just said, grunt, whistle, wave arms. And
the censor would say, Well, there's no treason
here. But then on stage, through his intonation
and his gestures, Faux could make it crystal
clear to the audience that the grunt was the
prime minister and the whistle was a bribe being
passed under the table. That is genius. It's
plausible deniability as an art form. It allowed
him to say the unsayable. right in front of the
authorities. And he starts honing this skill
in the 1950s. Which leads us to his first big
break. He gets a radio show on the national broadcaster,
RAI. It's called Porn Nano. Which means poor
thing. And this show is fascinating because it
is our first real glimpse of Faux deconstructing
what he saw as the sacred cows of culture. He
took these monolithic stories, biblical tales,
Shakespeare, historical epics, and he just twisted
them to show the real grubby version underneath.
The examples in the notes are just wild. He did
a version of Hamlet, but in his version, Hamlet
is... No, not at all. In Faux's version, Hamlet
kills his own father, not out of revenge for
his murder, but because he wants to continue
an affair he's having with his mother, Gertrude.
That is a very different take. And Ophelia is
portrayed as his uncle's trans mistress. What?
And Horatio isn't a ghost or a noble friend.
He's just a guy in a sheet who only shows up
when Hamlet is drunk. He's completely shredding
it. He's taking the most sacred texts of Western
culture and turning them into a depraved soap
opera. He also did an albino Othello and a sadistic
Juliet who keeps Romeo trapped in the garden
with savage dogs because she enjoys watching
him suffer. I would pay good money to hear that
today. But the authorities in 1950s Italy, I
imagine they were not laughing. Oh, no. They
canceled the show. Yeah. And this is a recurring
theme we are going to see over and over again.
Faux finds a platform. Faux says something shocking.
The authorities panic and they shut him down.
But censorship just pushed him back to the stage.
And around this time, something arguably more
important than the radio show happens in his
life. He meets Franck Aram. In 1954, they were
working together in a review called Seven Days
in Milan. Now, I want to circle back to what
you said earlier about Frank Aram. I was looking
at the notes, and I think it's easy to assume
she was just another talented actress he met
in Milan, but her background is actually deeper
in theater than his is, isn't it? Much, much
deeper. If Faux was a self -taught storyteller
from the provinces, Frank Aram was theatrical
royalty. Right. She came from a family of traveling
players, the Rehm family, who had been performing
in Lombardy and Piedmont for literally generations.
How far back. The sources say it dates back to
the 1600s. She was born on the stage. Practically.
She made her stage debut as an infant in her
mother's arms. She knew the mechanics of touring,
of costumes, of reading an audience, of managing
the books. She knew the business inside and out.
So when they married and formed the Campagna
for Rom. She brought that professional infrastructure.
Faux provided the manic creativity, the scripts,
the set designs, the painting. But Rom provided
the discipline, the incredible acting chops,
and the administrative steel to keep the whole
enterprise from falling apart. They were a power
couple before that term even existed. And they
start having real success. They're doing reviews.
They're in films. They're becoming the darlings
of the Italian entertainment scene. They were
rich. They were famous. They were comfortable.
Very comfortable. But then comes 1962 and the
Kanzanissima scandal. This is the moment where
they go from being popular entertainers to being
troublemakers. And Kanzanissima wasn't just a
show. It was the show. It was a massive... primetime
TV variety lottery show connected to the New
Year's celebration. So millions of people watching.
Millions. The sources say that taxi drivers in
Italian cities would complain they had no work
while it was on because everyone in the entire
country was at home watching it. So they have
the biggest platform in the country. They have
the eyes of the entire nation. And what do they
do with it? They decide to do a sketch about
a canned meat factory. It sounds so innocuous
on the surface, doesn't it? A funny little sketch
about a factory. But it was brutal satire. Walk
us through it, what actually happens in the sketch.
Okay, so the sketch featured a fat aunt who goes
to visit her nephew at his workplace. A canned
meat factory. She's looking around, she's marveling
at all the machinery, and then through a series
of slapstick mishaps, she falls into a mincing
machine. A classic comedy setup. But she comes
out the other end as minced meat. Canned meat.
And the punchline isn't just, oh no, auntie is
dead. The punchline is that the nephew takes
the can home and keeps the canned aunt in a cupboard.
He doesn't bury her. He just keeps the can. That
is so dark. The reaction was immediate. But interestingly,
it wasn't aunt's associations who complained.
It wasn't the moral majority concerned about
the sanctity of human life. Who was it? It was
meat producers and the industrialists. Why? Because
it made their product look bad? Because it was
a scathing critique of working conditions and
the commodification of human life under capitalism?
The subtext was crystal clear. To the factory
owner, a worker and a cow are the same thing.
They're just meat for the machine. The industrialists
saw it as a direct attack on the economic miracle
of post -war Italy. So the pressure is on. The
network RAI is getting very nervous. And then
a few episodes later, Faux and Ram want to do
another sketch. This one is about safety on construction
sites. Specifically... about how many workers
were dying due to a lack of basic safety protocols.
The producers at RAI said absolutely not. Just
a flat no. They said it would inflame the unions
and cause strikes. They demanded huge cuts to
the script. So what did Fo and Rahm do? Did they
rewrite it? Did they water it down? They walked
out. They quit the most popular show in Italy
mid -season. Just like that. RAI sued them for
breach of contract, destroyed the recordings
of their episodes, and effectively banned them
from Italian television for 14 years. 14 years.
Can you imagine being the biggest star on TV,
like a top late night host or a beloved sitcom
actor today, and then just vanishing from the
airwaves because you refused to cut a joke about
construction safety? It was, on paper, career
suicide. But this exile from television is what
forced them to radicalize. If they couldn't be
on the bourgeois screen, then they would go directly
to the people. And that brings us right to 1968.
The world is exploding. You have the May 68 protests
in France, the student movements everywhere,
the civil rights movement in the U .S., and Faux
and Ramey decide, we're done with the official
theater. They completely abandon the lucrative,
comfortable theater circuit. No more velvet seats.
No more high ticket prices. They set up a new
organization, the Associazione Nuova Sena. And
where do they perform? In community centers,
in workers' clubs, bowling alleys, factories
that were occupied by strikers, places affiliated
with the Communist Party. This is where that
mission we talked about in the intro really kicks
in. They weren't just performing plays anymore.
They were reviving this medieval concept, the
jular. The jular. Yeah. The medieval strolling
player. The jester. Faux became absolutely obsessed
with this figure. So explain the jester to us,
because I think most of us have a very Disney
version of that in our heads. You know, the guy
in the funny hat with the bells juggling balls
for the king. Forget the Disney version entirely.
In the Middle Ages, the jester wasn't just a
clown. He was a deeply subversive element. He
was often the only person in the entire kingdom
who was allowed to speak truth to power. Because
it was couched in a joke. Exactly. He could mock
the bishop, he could mock the king, provided
he was funny enough to get away with it and not
get his head chopped off. It's high -stakes stand
-up comedy. That's a perfect way to describe
it. Faux saw the jester as the authentic voice
of the people against the feudal lords. And he
realized that 1968 wasn't all that different
from 1268. You still had lords, the industrialists,
the politicians. You still had the church telling
people to suffer now for a reward in heaven.
So he decided to bring the jester back. And the
play that embodies this best, his absolute masterpiece,
is Mr. Obufo. Mr. Obufo, or comical mystery play.
It premiered in 1969. It's a solo piece, essentially
just faux on stage in a black sweater and black
pants. No set, no props, just him, his body,
and the audience. And this is the work that the
Vatican called the most blasphemous show in history?
Until the one. We have to dig into this. What
was so blasphemous about it? Give us an example
of a sketch from the play. Okay, let's take his
version of the resurrection of Lazarus. In the
Bible, this is a very solemn, powerful miracle.
Jesus raises a man from the dead. Right. In Faux's
version, he doesn't play Jesus or Lazarus. He
plays the crowd. He becomes the ticket seller
who is charging people admission. to see the
miracle. He's monetizing it. He's monetizing
it. He plays the guy selling snacks. He plays
the skeptics in the crowd who are betting on
whether it will work. So he's treating a holy
miracle like a carnival sideshow. Precisely.
The crowd is shouting things like, come on, Jesus,
do the trick, make him jump. And when Lazarus
finally does rise from the dead, it's not this
holy transcendent moment. It's chaotic and messy.
Faux portrays the keeper of the cemetery, who
is annoyed because he's losing a tenant and has
to give the money back. The satire isn't really
attacking Jesus. Faux actually had a lot of respect
for the historical Jesus as a revolutionary figure.
It was attacking the way the church and society
package religion as a spectacle. to distract
the poor from their suffering. It's that idea
of scourging authority, which the Nobel Committee
later cited. But even though they were performing
for workers and communists at this point, Faux
wasn't exactly a toe -of -the -line party member,
was he? Far from it. Faux was fiercely independent.
He openly criticized the official Italian Communist
Party, the PCI, for being too bureaucratic, too
moderate. Too stuffy. Too stuffy, exactly. He
thought they were becoming just another part
of the establishment they were supposed to be
fighting. led to a lot of friction. Eventually,
he and Raymay broke away to form yet another
group, Lacombe. And they set up shop in an abandoned
building in Milan, the Palazzina Liberty. which
they physically occupied. It was an abandoned
market building full of rats and trash. They
cleaned it up with volunteers, built a stage,
a library, a conference center. It became this
incredible hub for the extra -parliamentary left,
a place where you could go see a play, debate
politics, and organize a strike all in the same
night. And this brings us into the 1970s, and
we need to set the scene for you, because this
period in Italy has a specific name, the Years
of Lead. And this wasn't just a time of spirited
political debate. This was, as I said before,
a low -level civil war. Why lead? Because of
the bullets. It was a period of intense domestic
terrorism from both the far right and the far
left. You had neo -fascist groups planting bombs
in public squares to create chaos. You had radical
leftist groups like the Red Brigades kidnapping
and assassinating politicians. And in the middle
of it all, you had what was known as the strategy
of tension. Explain that term, strategy of tension.
The theory, which has been largely borne out
by historical inquiry since, was that elements
within the Italian state, the secret services,
were colluding with right -wing terrorists. To
what end? To allow or even facilitate these bombings.
The goal was to make the public so terrified
of chaos that they would demand a strong authoritarian
government to restore order. They wanted to scare
the people back into submission. That is terrifying.
The idea of state -sponsored terror against its
own citizen. And this is the exact paranoid,
violent context in which Faux writes his most
famous play, Accidental Death of an Anarchist.
And this play was ripped straight from the headlines
of the day. Literally. In December 1969, a bomb
went off in Piazza Fontana in Milan, killing
17 people. The police immediately blamed the
anarchists. They arrested a railway worker named
Giuseppe Pinelli. While he was in custody, being
interrogated on the fourth floor of the police
station, he fell out of the window and died.
Fell. That word is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
A lot. The police claimed it was a suicide. They
said he yelled, the end of anarchy, and then
just jumped. The left, and frankly, common sense,
suggested he was pushed or thrown. So Faux takes
this horrific tragedy. A man almost certainly
murdered by the police, and he does something
incredibly audacious. He turns it into a farce.
A grotesque farce about a tragic farce, as he
called it. But how do you make a murder funny?
By focusing on the absurdity of the lies. The
play features a central character called the
Maniac. He's a certified madman with a history
of impersonation who infiltrates the police station.
Okay. And he impersonates a high court judge
who he claims is there to reinvestigate the suicide.
So the police think he's a judge, but the audience
knows he's completely crazy. Exactly. And because
the police think he's a superior authority figure,
they start telling him the truth. about all their
cover -ups and contradictions, trying to get
him on their side. Wow, this is brilliant. The
maniac uses their own twisted logic against them.
He points out all the contradictions in their
official reports. Oh, so he jumped out the window,
but the window closed. How interesting. Tell
me more. He makes them dance. He makes them tie
themselves in knots. He forces them to reenact
the event over and over, making them look like
bumbling, incompetent idiots. The brilliance
of it is that by making the police clowns, Foe
stripped them of their terrifying power. He taught
the audience that if you can laugh at a monster,
the monster can no longer paralyze you with fear.
It's laughter as an exorcism of fear. Precisely.
And the audience response was electric. But the
state's response was not. When you make power
look that ridiculous, power tends to lash out.
And in 1973, the violence came to their doorstep
in the most horrific way imaginable. We're talking
about the abduction of Frank Aram. Yes. And I
want to pause here because the details are important.
Understand the price they were willing to pay.
In March of 1973, Frank Aram was walking near
their theater. Five men known fascists forced
her into a van at gunpoint. And this wasn't just
a random street crime. No. Later investigations
and testimonies suggested this was commissioned
by high -ranking officials in the carabiniere,
the military police, as a direct punishment for
the couple's activism. What did they do to her?
They held her for hours. They raped her repeatedly.
They beat her. They burned her with cigarettes.
They slashed her with razor blades. My God. It's
just pure political sadism. They dumped her in
a park, bleeding and traumatized. The message
was absolutely clear. Shut up or next time we
will kill you. Most people would have quit. Most
people would have taken the first plane out of
Italy and never looked back. I would have. But
they didn't break. Franco Rame went back on stage.
Not immediately, of course, but she refused to
disappear. Years later, she turned that trauma
into a monologue called The Rape. I've read the
transcript of that monologue. It is just harrowing.
It is one of the most powerful and courageous
pieces of theater ever written. She performs
it simply, without melodrama. She reclaims the
narrative from her attackers. She took the weapon
they used to try and destroy her, which was fear
and shame, and she turned it back on them as
a public accusation. It just highlights that
their work wasn't just art. This was high stakes
political warfare. It's incredible that they
kept provoking after that. There's this amazing
story about a play called The People's War in
Chile. This is right after the Pinochet coup
in Chile in 1973. This is one of the most astonishing
examples of Faux's ability to completely blur
the line between theater and reality. Right.
So the play was about the coup in Chile, but
Faux staged it in a way that made the Italian
audience believe a coup was happening right there
in Italy while they were watching the play. Wait,
how do you even do that? How do you trick an
entire audience into thinking the government
has just been overthrown? He planted actors in
the audience. Halfway through the show, Police
would burst into the theater. They started arresting
people from their seats. They announced over
the speakers that a military junta had taken
over Rome. And they had fake radio broadcasts
playing news of the coup. Yes, over the theater's
sound system. And people bought it. Hook, line,
and sinker. You have to remember, this is the
years of lead. A right -wing coup was a genuine
daily fear for people on the left. The panic
was real. The notes say a student in the town
of Murano actually broke a window to escape the
theater. And a man in Turin, this is my favorite
detail of the whole story, was so terrified that
he ate 10 pages of compromising names from his
personal notebook because he thought the police
were coming for him next. He ate the paper. He
chewed and swallowed 10 pages of evidence. That
is the level of paranoia and the level of immersion
that Fo was able to achieve. And he was arrested
for this, right? Yes, he was actually arrested
for causing public alarm in Sasseri. But the
stunt just proved his point. Italy was living
on the edge of a precipice. So they are conquering
Italy. They are the most controversial, famous
and infamous couple in the country. But what
about the rest of the world? By the mid 70s,
Faux is becoming a huge international name. His
plays are being translated and performed everywhere.
In 1974, he writes, Can't pay. won't pay, which
in Italian is non si paga, non si paga. Which
is such a great title. It sounds like a protest
chant. It was. It documented a real movement
called autoreduzione or self -reduction. During
the economic crisis, inflation was skyrocketing.
So working class women would go to the supermarket,
see the insane prices and just say, no, I'm paying
what I can afford. Or they would just take the
goods. It's Robin Hood in the pasta aisle. Exactly.
And the play is a farce about two women who loot
a supermarket and then have to hide the stolen
food from their law -abiding, very traditional
husbands and from the police. So how do they
hide the food? By shoving bags of pasta and cans
of olives and vegetables up their dresses and
pretending to be pregnant. Of course they do.
So you have these sudden miraculous pregnancies,
bags of salad leaking water down their legs like
their water broke, police trying to interrogate
their bellies. It's pure slapstick, but again,
the core is tragic. People are stealing just
to be able to eat. It became a global hit. But
while the rest of the world was embracing faux,
one country was slamming the door shut. The United
States. The land of the free. Faux and Franco
-Ram were repeatedly denied entry visas, 1980
-1983. The State Department just banned them.
They used the McCarran -Walter Act, which was
this old Cold War era law. They accused the couple
of belonging to organizations supporting terrorist
groups. Which goes back to their support for
political prisoners and the radical left in Italy.
The supreme irony, of course, was that at that
exact moment, Dario Fo was the most performed
foreign playwright in the United States. Right.
Colleges, community theaters, major repertory
companies, everyone was doing Accidental Death
of an Anarchist. The man who wrote it couldn't
step foot in the country to see a single performance.
The American arts community wasn't having it,
though. There was this big protest event, an
evening without Dario Fo in New York. A who's
who of American culture showed up. Arthur Miller,
Martin Scorsese, Bernard Malamud, Susan Sontag.
They all came out to protest the ban. They stood
on stage and read from his plays. And Fo, being
Fo, had the absolute perfect response to the
terrorist accusation. He held a press conference
in Canada, I think. He did. And he used pure
cold logic to destroy the U .S. State Department's
argument. He said, essentially, OK. Let's think
about this. I am an Italian citizen. Italy is
a major U .S. ally in NATO. If I'm supporting
terrorists, I am a criminal in my own country.
Why haven't the Italian police arrested me? Why
am I free to walk around Milan? This is a very
good point. He was implying that by banning him,
the Americans were insulting the intelligence
of the Italian authorities. He was saying either
the Italian police are incompetent for letting
a dangerous terrorist roam free or they are complicit
in my terrorism. He turned it into a diplomatic
incident. He used the maniac's logic again. I'm
not the problem here. Your logic is the problem.
Eventually, the ban was lifted. But it just goes
to show how much fear his words, his jokes generated.
The United States government was genuinely afraid
of a clown. So let's fast forward a bit. We get
to the late 80s and 90s. The political violence
in Italy has largely subsided. The years of lead
are over. But the corruption and hypocrisy haven't
gone away. And Faux finds new targets. In 1989,
he writes a play called The Pope and the Witch.
Okay, the plot of this one is, well, it makes
the pregnant women with stolen pasta look completely
normal. It is quintessential faux. It's an all
-out assault on the church's stance on drugs
and abortion. By having a pope who is addicted
to heroin. Well, the plot is that the pope has
crippling arthritis and a phobia of children.
A witch. who is actually a woman in disguise
advocating for liberal drug policies, advises
him on alternative treatments. And yes, through
a series of classic forcical mix -ups, the Pope
ends up swinging from a chandelier in the Vatican,
hallucinating after accidentally injecting heroin
to try and cure his joint pain. I can see why
the Vatican wasn't sending him Christmas cards.
It's grotesque. It's over the top. But notice
the target again. He's attacking the hypocrisy
of a wealthy, powerful institution that preaches
a very strict morality, while... in his view,
ignoring the suffering happening on the streets,
the drug epidemic, the AIDS crisis. He's literally
bringing the post down to the level of a common
junkie. And then in 1997, the impossible happens.
The phone rings in Milan. It's Stockholm. The
Nobel Prize in literature. It was a shock to
everyone, including and maybe especially to Dario
Fo himself. He thought it was a joke. He was
driving on the highway when he heard the news.
Someone held up a sign to his car, I believe.
His first reaction was to say, This Nobel business
is a real comedy. He couldn't believe the Swedish
Academy would pick a jester. And the literary
establishment was horrified, right? The serious
tweed -wearing novelists. Oh, the critics were
clutching their pearls. They said he wasn't a
writer. He was a performer. They said his texts
were just scripts. They weren't literature with
a capital L. But the citation, the official citation
from the Nobel Committee is just beautiful. It
feels like it validates his entire life's work.
It is perfect. They praised him for, quote, emulating
the gestures of the Middle Ages, inscurging authority
and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden.
They got it. They understood exactly what he
had been doing for 50 years. They recognized
that literature isn't just words on a page. It's
the living act of speaking truth to power. It
was this incredible international validation.
But did it mellow him out? Did he become a respectable
old laureate? Did he start wearing tuxedos and
going to stuffy galas? Not in the slightest.
In the 2000s, he found his perfect ultimate nemesis.
Yeah. A man who was arguably even more theatrical
than Faux, but in a much more dangerous way.
Silvio Berlusconi. The billionaire media tycoon
turned prime minister. The man who owned the
very TV stations that Faux had been banned from.
for decades. And Faux wrote a play about him,
The Two -Headed Anomaly, in 2003. The plot is,
just listen to this plot. Okay. Vladimir Putin's
brain is transplanted into Silvio Berlusconi's
head after an accident. You can't make this stuff
up. The play depicted Berlusconi strapped to
a chair receiving electric shock treatment, trying
to control the aggressive Putin brain that's
now inside his own head. It was a direct, savage
attack on Berlusconi's media control, his business
conflicts of interest, and his authoritarian
tendencies. And, of course, it led to lawsuits.
Of course. Senator Marcello Dell 'Utri, a close
associate of Berlusconi, sued him for defamation.
And Foge said, I've been doing satire for 40
years. It is paradox. It is grotesque. You cannot
sue a joke. He just refused to back down. In
2006, he even ran for mayor of Milan. His campaign
slogan was, I am not a moderate. Which is truth
in advertising, if nothing else. He didn't win,
but he came in second in the primary election.
He vowed to chase out the money -grabbing bastards
from City Hall. And right up until his death
in 2016, he was still active. He became a key
ideologue and supporter for the five -star movement,
the big anti -establishment party in Italy. He
never, ever stopped engaging with the messy reality
of politics. He died at the age of 90. An absolutely
packed life that spanned from listening to stories
from those mad glassblowers in Lombardy to standing
on the stage at the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm.
So when we look back at this huge stack of sources,
the plays, the court cases, the bans, the awards,
the violence, what is the big takeaway? What
does the life of Dario Faux teach us today? I
think the core lesson is about the function of
laughter. For most of us, most of the time, laughter
is a break. It's a distraction. We watch a sitcom
to forget about our bad day at work. It's escapism.
Right. But for Faux, laughter was never escapism.
It was a weapon. It was a tool to dismantle fear.
How so? When you laugh at the tyrant, the tyrant
becomes small and ridiculous. When you turn the
police interrogation into a slapstick force,
the terrifying power of the state evaporates.
You see the corruption and the lies underneath,
and you see them for what they are. Absurd. He
believed that knowledge is only valuable when
it's applied. And he applied his art directly
to fight for the dignity of those who had no
voice, no power. He really was the Gilaire of
the 20th century. And he paid the price for it.
The censorship, the arrests, the horrific violence
against his family. But he never stopped speaking.
You know, there's a quote from him that really
stuck with me while reading through the sources.
It's about drugs, but I think it applies to everything,
to economics, to media, to power in general.
He said, rich people consume and use drugs while
poor people are used and consumed by drugs. It's
a brilliant inversion. It completely flips the
narrative of blame. It makes you wonder. In our
era with social media, misinformation, all these
new power structures that are so diffuse and
hard to even see, who are the jesters today?
That is the question, isn't it? We have plenty
of comedians. We have plenty of content creators
making jokes. But who is willing to be banned?
Who is willing to be sued? Who is willing to
risk their physical safety to tell a joke that
exposes a dangerous truth? And maybe the harder
question is, are we listening to them? Or are
we the ones calling the police? Something to
think about. That's it for this deep dive into
the wild, contradictory life of Dario Fo. Thanks
for listening.