16. Giullare Part 1 - Street Performers

Before the court jester, before commedia dell'arte, there was the giullare — the medieval Italian street performer who set up in market squares with no stage, no script, no patron, and no safety net. Be funny or starve was not a metaphor. It was the operating condition.

In this episode of Flourish in Times of Struggle, I explore the giullari — agitators, satirists, and physical performers who mocked the powerful, named what everyone knew but no one was supposed to say out loud, and planted in their audiences something more fragile and more powerful than anger. Hope. The recognition that power is not inevitable. That things could be otherwise.

Transcript

FLOURISH IN TIMES OF STRUGGLE
Humor as Resistance #16: The Giullari — Jesters Without a Court, Part One

INTRODUCTION

Hi. This is Michael C. Patterson. Welcome to Flourish in Times of Struggle podcast. This episode continues my explore humor and performance as a tool of political resistance — and as a means of maintaining our sanity in difficult times.

In previous episodes we looked at the court jester — the licensed fool who mocked the king within carefully defined limits, and who ended up serving the king's legitimacy more than challenging it. We looked at commedia dell'arte and Dario Fo, at carnival and the carnivalesque, at Poland's Orange Alternative. We've been building an argument: that humor aimed upward at power, embedded in organized resistance, participatory rather than spectacular, can crack the paradigm that makes unjust systems seem inevitable and permanent.

Today I want to go back further. Before the court jester, before commedia dell'arte, before any of it — there was a figure who embodied all of these impulses in a single body, performing in a piazza with no stage, no script, no patron, and no safety net.

The Italians called him the giullare. Pronounced joo-LAR-eh. Plural: giullari. And Dario Fo considered himself a direct descendant of the giullari tradition.

SECTION ONE: WHO WERE THE GIULLARI?

In medieval Italy and across medieval Europe, the giullari were itinerant performers — traveling from town to town, setting up in market squares, performing for whoever showed up. They were musicians, acrobats, mimes, jugglers, satirists, and storytellers. Often all of these at once, in the same performance, in the same body.

They were not court jesters. That distinction matters enormously. The court jester performed for the king and his courtiers, within limits the king set, on terms the king approved. His mockery was licensed. His survival depended on pushing and probing, but never going too far.

The giullare had no such arrangement. No patron. No license. No protection. He performed for peasants and craftsmen and market crowds — people who recognized themselves in the characters and situations, people whose own suffering and frustration and anger were the raw material of the performance. He passed the hat. If the performance worked, he ate. If it didn't, he didn't. Be funny or starve is not a metaphor. It was the actual operating condition.

The historical record refers to the giullari as men. The reality was almost certainly more complicated. Women performed in this tradition — the French called them jonglaresse — but they faced opposition the male giullare did not. The Church and civil authorities viewed female performers as a corrupting influence, little better than prostitutes. The same institutions that prosecuted the giullare for blasphemy and sedition prosecuted women simply for performing at all. Which means the women who persisted did so at greater risk — and that the ones who disguised themselves as men, or sheltered behind the ambiguity that cross-dressing performance created, were exercising a form of resistance all their own.

Because the giullare had no patron to protect them and no license to preserve, they could go as far as the crowd would follow. Which was usually quite far.

The giullari were frequently in trouble with the law — prosecuted for blasphemy, for sedition, for mocking the powerful. They were, in the most literal sense, agitators. Not organizers with a program and a strategy. Agitators — people who disturbed the settled surface of things, made the invisible visible, named what everyone knew but no one was supposed to say out loud.

What did they agitate about? The same things that have always burdened those at the bottom of the hierarchy. Hunger. Disease. Poverty. Oppression. The gap between the sermon and the reality — the Church preaching poverty while accumulating land and wealth. The feudal lord who owned the land, owned the harvest, and owned the bodies of the people who worked both. The endless conscription of serfs into wars fought for noble ambitions that had nothing to do with the lives of the people doing the dying. The peasant who broke his back on someone else's land and watched his children go hungry while the landlord's table groaned.

These were not abstract political arguments. They were the daily material of people's lives. The giullare named them, mocked the people responsible for them, and made a crowd of exhausted, hungry, angry people laugh at the system that was grinding them down. That laughter was not escape. It was recognition. It was the crowd saying: yes, that is exactly what it is.

And there was something else the laughter did. It punctured the balloon of authority. The feudal lord who presented himself as divinely ordained, naturally superior, beyond question — the giullare put him on stage as a buffoon. The sheriff whose power depended on being feared became, for the length of a performance, ridiculous. The priest who preached chastity and charity while doing neither was exposed in mime and gesture before a crowd that knew exactly who was being described.

PROFANATION  - MOCKING AUTHORITY 

The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin — whose framework for understanding carnival we explored in an earlier episode — identified this as one of the essential elements of the carnivalesque. He called it profanation: the pulling back of the curtain on the sacred claim, the stripping away of the costume of authority to reveal the ordinary, fallible, frequently corrupt human being underneath. Once we have peeked under that costume — or stripped it away entirely — it is very hard to put it back on convincingly.

The lord could punish the giullare. He could not un-ring the bell. The crowd had laughed. They had seen it together, publicly, collectively. And what has been seen together cannot be entirely unseen.

That is why the authorities prosecuted them. Not because a joke is a revolution. But because laughter at power provides a spark. It ignites the recognition that power is not inevitable. It rouses people from the stupor of defeat — from the gray, grinding sense that this is simply how things are and always will be. At its best it moves an audience beyond demoralization and plants something in the imagination: the possibility of something better.

The authorities understood this threat. They may not have been able to articulate it, but they felt it in their bones. Something has shifted in the people who laughed. They see their lives through different eyes. The facts haven't changed — the tithe is still due tomorrow, the lord still owns the harvest. But the frame has cracked. What seemed permanent has been revealed as constructed. What seemed natural has been exposed as a choice — someone else's choice, made in someone else's interest.

And with that crack comes something more fragile and more powerful than recognition. Hope. The giullare who shows the clever servant outwitting the sheriff, the zanni who runs rings around Pantalone — these are not just jokes. They are demonstrations. They say: the powerful can be outmaneuvered. The inevitable is not inevitable. And a people that has glimpsed that possibility — that has laughed at it together, publicly, in the open air — is a different people than the one that handed over a tenth of its harvest to the Church that morning, or dragged its share of the crops to the lord's storehouse at sunset. That is the shift. And a shifted people is a dangerous one.

It is not a shift in circumstances but in consciousness — the shift occurs the moment a people stops experiencing power as natural and begins seeing it as constructed. The lord's authority was never just his sword or his castle. It was the entire architecture of shared belief that made his claim feel self-evident: God's will, the natural order, the way things have always been. The giullare didn't attack the castle. He laughed at the hierarchy's origin story. And a story that has been laughed at publicly, among neighbors, in the open air, is harder to believe completely the next morning. The lord is still the lord. But the hierarchy's origin story — the one that made his authority feel as inevitable as the seasons — has developed a crack.

THE ANALYTIC POWER OF COMEDY

Why were the giullari the ones who saw the oppression clearly enough to name it? Probably not because they were more politically conscious than anyone else in the piazza. More likely because their craft demanded it. To be funny you need conflict. To hold an audience you need scenarios that connect and resonate — that make the crowd lean forward, laugh, and nod. That requires looking hard at what is actually happening in the world around you. Finding the gaps. The contradictions. The cracks in the hierarchy's origin story.

The giullare was hunting for comic material in the life of the people. What he kept finding was injustice. The two were inseparable — because injustice, at its core, is a contradiction.

Comedy lives in the gap between what something claims to be and what it actually is. The wider the gap, the darker the laugh. A lord who behaves like a brute while claiming divine authority is not just hypocritical — he is absurd, in the precise sense: his performance has become detached from any reality that could justify it. Yet he goes on claiming. The peasants go on seeing. The gap between those two facts is where the giullare planted his material. And almost by default, the comedy targeted the injustice — because that same gap is where injustice lives: in the space between the official story and the lived experience of the people subject to it.

The giullare found fertile comedic ground in human frailty — vanity, self-deception, greed, hypocrisy — the very qualities that allow systems of injustice to take root and flourish. His audience recognized both the laughter and the wound. They were the same thing. The lord who claims divine right while behaving like a brute. The bishop who preaches poverty from a palace. The contradiction is the joke. The joke is the argument.

And in performing that argument — night after night, piazza after piazza — the giullare was doing something community organizers and activists have understood across centuries, even if the giullare himself never would have used that language. The oppressed often don't think about what oppresses them. They bear it. They consider it the way of nature. The agitator's job — and the giullare was always, by his nature, an agitator — is to interrupt that resignation. To name the absurdity. To put a face on the grievance. To convert the dull ache of endurance into something sharper and more useful. Anger with a target.

AGITATION:  NECESSARY BUT NOT SUFFICIENT

The giullare's role may be more modest than the romantic version suggests — and more essential. He does not make the revolution. He keeps the possibility of one from becoming unthinkable. He speaks truth to power not because speaking will move power, but because silence would move the people — toward resignation, toward the acceptance that this is simply how things are and must always be. He keeps the spark alive.

What ignites that spark into something larger is never his doing alone. It requires the fortuitous convergence of circumstances — material conditions that shift, a visible injustice that crystallizes resentment, an organizing structure that can channel what the spark ignites. The giullare provides none of those things. He provides only the refusal to let the spark go out.

So the giullare stands at the beginning of the chain — not the whole chain, but the first essential link. He interrupts the resignation. He cracks the frame. He plants the hope. But agitation without organization has nowhere to go. The spark needs tinder, and the tinder needs someone to arrange it.

CONCLUSION — PART ONE

In Part Two we follow the giullare tradition forward — into the body as political instrument, into the work of Dario Fo and Franca Rame, who carried this tradition into the occupied factories and prisons of twentieth century Italy, and into the streets and protest marches of our own moment. We will also ask what a community organizer named Saul Alinsky — writing in Chicago in the 1970s, with no knowledge of the giullari — understood about humor, contradiction, and the art of waking people up that the giullari had been practicing for five hundred years.

The spark is not enough. But without it, nothing starts.

Thanks for listening.  Let’s continue working together to flourish in times of struggle.