ABSTRACT
The primary purpose of this article is to offer a close reading of two major clowns of the twentieth century, Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) and Dario Fo (1926–2016) by using Bertolt Brecht’s notion of Epic as an interpretative tool. Far from claiming to provide any exhaustive explanation on their production, this article is an attempt to contribute to the research on clowning by proposing a very specific reading of Fo and Chaplin’s world. It traces back to three core features that seem to be embedded in the notion of Epic: dialectic, alienation, and politics. The clown, like the Harlequin, is also “the only member of the core characters who is free to pass from space to space maintaining his clown persona.” By transcending the conventions, the clown breaks the illusion of the scene and contests the limits of imposed conventions, which undoubtedly turn out to be mimetic, but also social, and thus inevitably political.
