"Are you Funny Enough?": Grotesque Laughter in Matei Vișniec's Old Clown Wanted and Consuelo de Castro's Walking Papers

Authors

Annette J. Saddik

Abstract

In Romanian-French playwright Matei Vișniec’s Old Clown Wanted and Brazilian playwright Consuelo de Castro’s Walking Papers, the literal or figurative clown serves to disrupt and reveal the illusion of stable social structures through grotesque laughter. Both plays, completed in 1987 during a time of political shifts in Romania and Brazil, use the ambiguous laughter of the grotesque to move beyond the absurd through their embrace of excess, the co-existence of contradictions, and the failure of rationality. During the second half of the twentieth century, the figure of the clown often appears as a key subversive figure in international plays that were reacting to systems of social and political oppression in a world that was still negotiating the effects of two world wars. Conflating laughter and sorrow, life and death, love and hate, hope and despair, they disrupt the fixed, closed boundaries of rational discourse, bursting through limitations and opening up a space that can begin to engage the complexities of personal, social, and political relationships under repressive systems. Operating outside of language, the grotesque moments in these plays are able to contain the threat of rupture by opening up space for the tensions of their coexisting contradictions and instabilities, generating possibilities for new ways of seeing, thinking, and being, in contrast to closed systems or communities. In both plays, the grotesque body therefore becomes a site for cultural and political transformation through its contradictions, oozing inconsistency and excess, and allowing potential spaces for regeneration and renewal through instability and failure.

Recommended Citation

Saddik, Annette J. (2026) ""Are you Funny Enough?": Grotesque Laughter in Matei Vișniec's Old Clown Wanted and Consuelo de Castro's Walking Papers," Comparative Drama: Vol. 59: Iss. 4, Article 2.
Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/compdr/vol59/iss4/2