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5 Making a Mockery of Everything We Hold True and Dear Exploring Parody with Tongue in a Mood’s PCN Salute (San Francisco, 1997) Authorities, any authorities, fear above all other things laughter, derision or even the smile, because laughter denotes a critical awareness; it signifies imagination, intelligence and a rejection of all fanaticism. —Dario Fo W HEN DARIO FO, the Italian playwright and performer, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997, he heard not only cheers but also jeers. “I doubt that Fo is an author of the first rank,” said Mario Vargas Llosa, wryly adding, “Even in the Nobel, as in other prizes, mistakes happen.” Maurizio Gasparri, a member of the Italian Parliament, referred to Fo as“a clown who is worthy of a circus, but not of a prize of this significance.”In the pages of theVatican’s L’Osservatore Romano, a writer noted that “Fo is the sixth Nobel from Italy after Carducci , Deledda, Pirandello, Quasimodo, [and] Montale. After these sages, a clown.”1 Performers like Fo, who draw inspiration from a long line of popular European entertainers such as “mummers, jesters, clowns, tumblers and storytellers,” insist on the change and play of meaning, even recasting the context through the alteration of one’s appearance, costume, gait, accent, gender, origin, and age. Fo’s critics attack along two fronts. First are those who do not share his politics. Consistently over his long career Fo has hurled jokes into the teeth of the powerful, refusing to take seriously those who wield power indiscriminately or unjustly. And they were listening. Fo and his wife of more than fifty years, Franca Rame, a noted performer in her own right and descendant of a long line of respected actors, have been denied entry into several countries, including the United States between 1980 and 1986, and were banned from appearing on Italian television and radio from 1962 to 1977.2 “A clown can’t always be smiling,” 128 • Chapter 5 wrote Fo. “There has to be passion behind the red nose. You have to have anger—anger at the injustice and oppression in the world. And the anger has to be supported by hard work. A clown has to have virtuoso technique, an understanding of the grotesque, and an extraordinary sense of generosity and love of the people.”3 A second set of critics does not believe that Fo is, in the strict sense, a “writer.” They uphold a bias for written over performed or oral texts, elite culture over the popular, and the tragic or dramatic over the comic. Fo sees himself as “freed from conventional literary writing” and chooses to express himself “with words that you can chew, with unusual sounds, with various techniques of rhythm and breathing, even with the rambling nonsense -speech of the grammelot.” A satirical vocal technique and speech style dating to sixteenth-century European performances, grammelot is augmented with gesture, singing, and sparse use of actual words in native tongues. It facilitated communication across multiple dialects and languages while evading censorious power from above. Fo’s work serves as an analogue for how artists take seriously the work of cultural criticism through parody. This chapter steps into an intersection of the parodic and Filipino American cultural forms.Asian American performing artists are a growing area of interest, with texts focused on theater and popular culture and expanding to dance and music.4 While some of that work analyzes comedic elements in the form of asides or specific moments that break narrative flow; rarely is comedy studied as its own genre.5 Nerissa Balce has offered a detailed treatment of Asian American comedic narratives, where folk laughter can be understood as acts of “defiance and courage against fear, organized religion and the power.”6 Rather than providing a distraction from serious issues or attempting to escape from harsh realities, the postcolonial author and performer turns directly to one’s immediate circumstance for the source of humor. This is a powerful and yet a delicate resource, one that can produce“critiques of an author’s or performer’s own culture viewed through the lens of alienation and defamiliarization.”7 As an expressive form of culture, comedy mediates Filipino American subjectivities whose function, according to another commentator, is to “[respond] to colonization through processes of cultural identity formation.”8 In the same year that a comic performer was awarded the Nobel Prize, a literary journal in San Francisco published a bitingly funny script by three...

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