THRIVING IN TIMES OF STRUGGLE

Comments? Send me a text message.

Part Two of the giullari episodes begins with a discussion of the body as political instrument and explores how the medieval street performer's tradition of physical humor has been used, again and again, as a means of resistance.  Gesture, facial expression, pratfalls, even profanity and vulgarity are used to expose the vulnerable humanity that exists, even behind the masks of invincibility used by those in power. 

The giullare spirit has found its most vibrant modern-day expression in the work of the Italian Dario Fo who uses physical humor to enlist his audience as co-conspirators in his satirical critiques of oppression. He describes a technique that assumes the audience has the equivalent of film camera in their head. Through gesture, facial expression and timing Fo induces the audience shift from close-up to broad view, to a medium shot all through creative use of his body. 

The giullare style of physical theatre can also be felt in the huge puppets of the Bread & Puppet theatre, the unsanctioned street performances of the San Francisco Mime Troupe and in the use of inflatable costumes during protest marches. 

We end the episode noting a surprising echo of the giullare spirit in the vision of the ideal community organizer as proposed by activist Saul Alinsky. Alinsky says that satire is an activist’s most powerful tool and the skills of the giullare help satire land with greatest effect. 

 The giullare character—their spirit of physical humor and resistance to authority—has been making good trouble for  seven centuries.

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.

Comments? Send me a text message.

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.

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.

Comments? Send me a text message.

In communist Poland in the 1980s, Solidarity had been driven underground. Martial law. Leaders imprisoned. On the surface, the regime had won. Then an art history student named Waldemar Fydrych — known as Major — painted a grinning dwarf on a freshly whitewashed wall. Not a slogan. Not a demand. A dwarf.

Episode 15 of Flourish in Times of Struggle explores Poland's Orange Alternative — the surrealist, carnivalesque resistance movement that embedded itself within Solidarity's organized underground and helped delegitimize communist rule through sustained public laughter. It asks the question at the heart of this series: when does humor actually change anything?

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.

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.

Comments? Send me a text message.

What do a sixteenth century Italian clown, a Nobel Prize-winning playwright, and a man who threw a Subway sandwich at a federal agent have in common? They are all practitioners of one of the oldest and most enduring forms of political humor: rude humor aimed at upsetting the powerful.

In this episode, I trace that tradition back to the market squares of Renaissance Italy and commedia dell'arte — where the clever servant Arlecchino regularly upended the normal social hierarchy by systematically humiliating his pompous master Pantalone in front of crowds of ordinary workers. 

The commedia tradition found its strongest modern expression in the Italian jester Dario Fo, who performed in occupied factories, public parks, and town squares. Like Arlecchino before him, Fo confronted the validity of oppressive hierarchies — and as a result was prosecuted forty times on charges of blasphemy and subversion. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997.

The episode explores a question that runs through the entire Humor as Resistance series: what makes rude humor politically effective? When does it crack open the assumptions of the powerful and lead to real change? And when does it simply make people laugh and send them home, leaving the hierarchy exactly as it found it?

The answer has less to do with the quality of the humor and more with the social context in which it is performed.

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.

Comments? Send me a text message.

The court jester is one of history's most misunderstood figures. Not merely an entertainer, the jester was the only person in the medieval court licensed to tell the king the truth — to mock power, puncture pretension, and name what everyone else was forbidden to say. In this episode, we explore what the jester's role reveals about the relationship between humor and power: how laughter can expose the absurdity of authority, and how authority has always worked to contain, co-opt, and control that laughter before it becomes dangerous.

We examine the jester as a structural feature of political systems — a built-in mechanism for correcting the feedback loops that cause leaders to lose touch with reality. And we ask what it means that modern authoritarian systems have no equivalent: no licensed fool, no sanctioned truth-teller, no court figure whose job is to say the unsayable. That absence, we argue, is not a trivial detail. It is a structural vulnerability — one that history suggests tends to end badly.

Part of an ongoing series on Humor as Resistance — using the history and theory of comedy, performance, and theatrical tradition to illuminate the political dynamics of our current moment.

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.

Comments? Send me a text message.

There is a word that has been sitting in the English language since the fifteenth century, quietly waiting for its moment. TRUMPERY. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a trumpery as deceit, fraud, imposture, trickery — something of less value than it seems. Worthless stuff, trash, rubbish. Shakespeare used it. The French coined it. And the man who embodies the word was born on June 14th, 1946.

In this episode, I suggest the launch of A Trumpery Campaign — a crowdsourced lexicon of pointed, humorous observations that name the absurdities, corruptions, and patterns of the Trump administration with precision and wit. Not invented absurdity. Observed abnormalities. Named inanity. Identified idiocies.

The episode provides examples from an early Trumpery Lexicon — from Speed Trumps to Trumpback Whales to Electile Dysfunction. It traces the comic history of a man who has spent his career putting his name on things that subsequently become doomed to failure.  

I invite listeners to create their own Trumperies and share them broadly. Send me an email with your own inventions . The best  submissions will be featured on June 14th — Trump's 80th birthday. The winner will receive a Golden Trumpinal Award to commemorate their wit and wisdom.

Laughter is resistance and the word has been waiting five centuries to take its place in a movement to save democracy. Let's put it to work.

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.

Comments? Send me a text message.

In this episode, I trace the origins of humor as a tool of political resistance to fifth-century Athens, where the playwright Aristophanes used comedy to mock warmongering leaders, puncture male vanity, and make the case for peace — in front of thousands of citizens, at the height of a ruinous war. 

Drawing on the history of Aristophanes' two great anti-war plays — The Knights and Lysistrata — the episode explores what humor can do that marches, lawsuits, and arguments alone cannot: name the absurdity, puncture the posture of power, and give people permission to say out loud what they already know.

But the Athens story is not a simple triumph. It raises harder questions too. Did the humor actually change anything? Whose interests did it serve? And what does it mean that tyrant was mocked brilliantly yet remained in power? 

Mark Twain, writing in the voice of Satan, put the challenge directly: "Your race has one really effective weapon — laughter. You leave it lying rusting. You lack sense and the courage."

This episode begins the quest to understand how humor can be used as an effective tool for change. 

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.

Comments? Send me a text message.

Dehumanization is one of the oldest tools of political control. And it follows a recognizable pattern.

In this episode, I identify and name what I call the Political Dehumanization Template — a five-component framework for understanding how those in power manufacture enemies, redirect legitimate grievances onto scapegoats, and license violence against targeted groups. The template is ancient. It is deliberate. And it is operating in American public life right now.

The five components are:

•  the manufactured threat, 
• the erasure of individuality, 
• two emotional weapons — disgust and existential terror — calibrated to produce either exclusion or extermination, 
• a self-sealing feedback loop immune to rational correction, 
• and the political function that serves those in power. 

Drawing on Timothy Snyder's Leib and Körper (living body vs. dead body) distinction and Isabel Wilkerson's work on caste, the episode traces the template from the European witch trials to the present moment — and offers three specific antidotes for those who want to resist 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.

Comments? Send me a text message.

What gives ordinary people power against those who hold it? One answer is as old as democracy itself: the deliberate, collective withdrawal of cooperation.

The Power of Withdrawal draws on three examples spanning twenty-four hundred years to ask what actually makes collective refusal work — and what each teaches us about the art of resistance.

In ancient Athens, Aristophanes' Lysistrata understood that power flows from cooperation — and that withdrawing what the powerful need most, whether that is labor, money, or something more intimate, is the first principle of effective resistance.

In County Mayo, Ireland, the tenant farmers who invented the word "boycott" took that principle further. They withdrew not just their labor but every form of social and economic cooperation from a cruel land agent — and discovered that total social ostracism, costing the British government ten thousand pounds to harvest crops worth five hundred, was more devastating than violence could ever have been.

In Montgomery, Alabama, the lesson became organizational. The Black community's 381-day refusal to ride segregated buses succeeded not because of a single courageous act, but because of years of invisible preparation — networks built, leadership developed, infrastructure laid — long before anyone knew when it would be needed.

Together these three examples reveal a consistent logic: identify what the powerful cannot do without, withdraw it collectively, and sustain that withdrawal through planning, organization, and strategic discipline.

Authoritarian power depends on our cooperation — our labor, our money, our silence, our compliance. History suggests we have more power to withdraw that cooperation than we have yet chosen to use

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.