Episode #14
14. Humor as Resistance - Carnival and Street Theater
Comments? Send me a text message. 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. Support the show If you want to support my work, click above, subscribe to the MINDRAMP Podcast, or sign up for the free Flourish As You Age newsletter for reviews of current research, reflections, and updates.
