Dysmorphia, aphthous stomatitis, hunger, beatings, "deaths" and "resurrections", "madness", meaningless pranks: these elements do not randomly reappear in the popular comedy of all places and times; they constitute a system, a symbolic language, which is rooted in the popular festival - in the type of popular festival we now call "carnival" and where the generative cell of traditional clown resides.
This language is explored here by Giannis Kiourtsakis. Starting from the theory of the Russian philosopher Bakhtin about popular laughter in the Middle Ages, he undertakes a long journey through time and space that gradually reveals to us, through the diversity of specific events, the fundamental code of "carnival". And in the light of this code, every "act", every prank, every "foolishness" of Karagiozis acquires an unsuspected meaning. A meaning that always refers to the ritual root of laughter - to the primordial "philosophy" of the festival for the body and nature, life and death, decay and renewal, the relativity of every "serious" truth, and the hidden unity of contradictions. A meaning that, however, never ceases to transform, as the world that reshapes the shadowy clown reflects itself necessarily in its language and nurtures it with its own experiences, its own ideology.
Thus, this study, which primarily examines the festival, laughter, and theater as international and timeless phenomena, gradually leads to modern Greece and the Neo-Hellenes: to the Neo-Hellenic persona that is hidden and at the same time revealed behind the mask of the comic hero. And the multiple approaches of the author - who combines the collection of rich ethnographic material with semiotic interpretation, structural method with historical perspective, lessons from religious studies with those from psychoanalysis, sociological approach with theater and literary theory with philosophical reflection - converge in a unique quest that can be summarized by the term cultural anthropology: ultimately, this book is a discourse about humanity and its culture - a discourse about us and our life.