The Comedy of Hunger by Ron Jenkins Hunger is a recurring theme in the comedies of Dario Fo . His characters are not just hungry for food. They are hungry for dignity, hungry for justice, and hungry for love. Men get pregnant, women give birth to cabbages, and amniotic fluid becomes the source of a gourmet meal. The mechanisms of farce become metaphors for liberation.
Slapstick confusion begets new ways of understanding the world.
Although they inhabit a world of spiraling absurdity, Fo's characters are as real as their hunger. Like Chaplin's tramp reduced to eating his shoe in The Gold Rush , Fo's clowns suffer from hungers with which everyone can identify. In the comedies of Dario Fo , the same might be said of starvation.