Education Quote by Dario Fo

Fo frames irony less as a technique he acquired than as a survival reflex he absorbed, the way you pick up an accent before you ever learn grammar. “When I was a boy” shrinks the origin story down to something intimate and almost offhand, then he snaps in two key adverbs: “unconsciously, spontaneously.” That pairing is a quiet flex. It suggests that his later, famously deliberate political theater wasn’t bolted on in adulthood; it was already running beneath the surface, automatic as breathing. He’s telling you his satire didn’t come from a seminar. It came from the street, the kitchen table, the local chatter where power gets mocked because direct accusation can be dangerous, or simply futile.

The phrase “the art of telling” matters, too. Fo doesn’t say he learned to spot irony; he learned to perform it. Irony here is communal craft: timing, exaggeration, a wink delivered with plausible deniability. That’s the DNA of his plays, which often disguise rage as farce and smuggle critique inside laughter. The subtext is political, but also classed. If you grow up outside the halls of authority, irony becomes a tool for flipping the script: you can narrate the world as it is while simultaneously exposing how absurd it is that it’s allowed to be that way.

Contextually, this is Fo locating his Nobel-winning persona in Italian popular tradition (giullari, commedia dell’arte), where the “fool” is licensed to speak truths everyone else swallows. By calling it unconscious, he also sidesteps the sanctimony trap: he’s not preaching. He’s reporting on an instinct to puncture hypocrisy before hypocrisy gets to call itself normal.