The zany theme of the fool

There is, in modern theatre, a resurgence of the zany theme of the fool, much of which is inspired by commedia dell’arte. The clever servants of the Zanni have led to the worldwide tradition of the inverted status relationship in which the usually lower-status servant character has the upper hand in terms of wit, truth, and intelligence while the supposedly upper-status master character must content himself with only the trappings of superiority.

This topsy-turvy situation arose from the historical circumstances in which the Commedia developed. This Venetian nickname of Zanni was a dialect version of Giovanni, a name common in the 15^th century among peasants from Bergamo, in Lombardy, who emigrated to Venice and Genoa from the economically destitute regions of Po valley. When the Venetian economy became developed through profit-sharing (maona) among the citizenry, international trade increased, decreasing the price of locally-produced foodstuffs, with the result that the peasants, the zanni, were brought to the point of bankruptcy. Being unable to sell their product, they had no option but to abandon their lands and emigrate in large numbers to Venice and Genoa. This influx was met with resentment and contempt. Zanni were treated as objects of derision, and their presence provided convenient scapegoats for every mishap. They had no command of the local language, they committed gaffes, and they were continuously hungry and in poor health.

The Zanni characters of the Commedia were based on these economic outcasts. Zanni were valet buffoons, clowns, and knavish jacks-of-all-trades; zanni possessed common sense, intelligence, pride, a love of practical jokes, although they often were also quarrelsome, cowardly, envious, spiteful, vindictive, treacherous. Frequently two zanni played contrasting roles, the first clever and adept at confounding, the second a dull-witted foil.

The forbears of the Commedia may have been the comic mime actors of ancient Greece and Rome. The term “mime” indicates that mimes imitated life (recall our theory of mimetic community); rather than being silent, these ancient mimes were masters of the tongue. One name for the mimic actor was autokabdalos, which can be translated “improvised.” As Beatrice Otto explains in Fools are Everywhere:

“These actors were decidedly ready and eager to take advantage of anything which, because of its baseness, its meaness, or its triviality, provided that laughter-provoking contrast between man’s mind and the fettering restrictions of his body, and they were ever ready to stand forward as the secular exponents of popular feeling. Improvisation gave the mimes a jester’s freedom to mock, and throughout history irreverence toward anything blindly revered was the cornerstone of their entertainment. Mimes had sung and spoken parts and could include acrobatic skills in their repertoire. Their acrobatic agility guaranteed that they should never be dull, never be fettered by religious prejudice or ceremonial. They stood, above all, for secularism and the right to laugh.”

However, ZanniTAVANI, stands, above all for TRUTH and the right to laugh in the face of failure. What is true can be well presented as parable; so must theatre go about imitating LIFE.