Analysis Of The Gospel According To Darrio Fo

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Dario Fo has many talents, he is a comical Italian writer, comedian, theatre director, stage designer, songwriter, and actor playwright. Fo has written many comical plays about the Catholic Church, but says he does “not” mock religion. Fo’s plays are entertaining but many people who follow the Catholic religion, can find his plays very disrespectful. “How have viewers received Dario Fo’s plays, and to what extent is Fo making fun of the religious content?” Fo states in his “Author’s Note”, that “it should be understood that giullare.. not trying to mock religion, God, and the saints, but attempted to unmask and denounce in a comic key the shrewd maneuvering of those who exploited religion and things sacred for their personal benefit” (Fo, …show more content…

As for my research process I went to “One Search” and typed “Dario Fo religion” and an article came up named “The Gospel According to Dario Fo.” The title is what interested me, it was Dario’s version of the gospel. I will also be using the playbook called “Mistero Buffo” by Dario Fo, which is translated by Ron Jenkins.

According to the article, “The Gospel According to Dario Fo,” the author Antonio Scuderi, believes that Dario Fo’s work is depicted on the gospels of the Bible’s New Testament. “In his satire of the Catholic Church, Fo presents the paternalistic God the Father as an instrument of suppression, while showing Jesus as being closer to the hearts of the folk” (Scuderi 334). Fo challenges the Church authority, “As we shall see, some of these writings pre- sent a more human and personal image of Jesus, while others (such as the Infancy Gospel of James, addressed below) may have been written primarily for entertainment” (Scuderi 334). Dario is not changing the story to the plays in the Bible, he is changing the perspective, and adding his own spin to it. Dario’s plays are supposed to be a “satirical farce” and entertaining (Scuderi 335). An example of “satirical farce”, was in “The Resurrection of Lazarus”, when Dario, was acting if the miracle performed by Jesus was a joke. In the …show more content…

I believe Dario Fo is not mocking religion itself , but he is mocking the hypocrites who go to church. “In the limited examples presented in this study, we have seen several functions of the apocryphal gospels. Dario Fo takes these up while giving them his personal touch. He fills in the gap in Jesus’s childhood left in the New Testament, by associating the holy family with poor migrant workers of his day and by having the child Jesus warn those in power of the coming revolution” (Scuredi 342). I believe Fo was an extremist, he has Religion beliefs that most people think are unreasonable or unacceptable. Fo has an outside of the box way of thinking, “He picks up on the presentation of a more human Jesus, and underscores his leitmotif of Jesus being closer to the hearts of the folk while presenting his commonsense attitude towards sex. But perhaps most important, the Apocrypha seem to fulfill the need to tell stories about the life and teachings of Jesus, and by fitting the Apocrypha into his own storytelling Fo continues the tradition” (Scuderi 342). Reading about Dario Fo, made me realize he isn’t making fun of religion, he “attempts to reinvent the techniques of the medieval giullari for a modern audience” (Jenkins

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