Jamie Lyons

I’ve been to enough funerals where people lie, where they smooth over the rough parts and make the departed into saints, but when Fo stood up to talk about Franca Rame, he didn’t do that comfortable, sanitized thing. He told the TRUTH, which is the only real act of love there is, and the whole point of their entire LIVES together was refusing to pretend the world is anything other than what it is.

He talked about her laughter. Not the polite kind, not the laugh track bullshit that greases social situations, but laughter as a weapon, as a middle finger to power. The kind that makes tyrants nervous because it shows you’re not broken, you refuse to BE broken. Even after what happened to her in ’73,  what those fascists did to that woman, kidnapped and brutalized in ways that should have ended her, she came back laughing. Not because everything was okay. Because fuck you, that’s why. Because joy and rage aren’t opposites, because you can laugh while you’re burning the whole corrupt edifice down.

And she wasn’t some sidekick, some “behind every great man” footnote. She WROTE, she PERFORMED, she was the fucking ENGINE of their whole operation. Fo knew it. Said it out loud. How many men have the balls to stand at a funeral and say “my wife was tougher than me, smarter than me, more essential to everything we built”? That kind of public reckoning with your own dependence on another person’s fire, that’s rare. Most people can’t admit their heroes, especially when that hero was their wife, their co-conspirator, the person who made them possible.

Fifty years of making art that mattered, that actually DID something. Not for the wine-and-cheese crowd, but theatre that makes people riot, that gets you arrested, that reminds the audience they have POWER if they just stop believing the lies. Communist guerrilla theatre, agitprop with a punchline, work that bites and remembers whose side it’s on.

She survived what most people don’t survive, and instead of disappearing into trauma, she weaponized it. Turned her rage and pain into plays about violence against women, about power, about the machinery that grinds people up. And she made people laugh while showing them the truth. That’s alchemy. That celebration and resistance are THE SAME THING when you’re celebrating the parts of humanity that make tyrants nervous: solidarity, courage, the refusal to accept that this is as good as it gets.

When Fo eulogized her, he was really eulogizing COMMITMENT. The real kind. Not hashtag activism or performative solidarity, but the kind where you risk everything, where you don’t separate your art from your politics from your LIFE because they’re all the same thing. A life that costs you something. The refusal to collaborate with your own oppression or shut up, even when, especially when, the bastards want you silent and afraid.

Some people leave a mark that changes how people think, how they resist, how they refuse to bow. She left that mark. And instead of making it neat and manageable, Fo stood there and said: she was everything. She survived the unsurvivable. She never stopped fighting. She made the world less dark by showing us how to laugh at the darkness.

That’s the whole point of all of this: to find someone who sees the same fight you do and decides to wage it beside you. To make something together that matters more than your individual survival. To refuse, together, to bow. And when it ends, because it always ends, to tell the truth about what you had.

Franca Rame was worth it all. And Dario Fo’s eulogy was the final collaboration: grief not as performance but as witness, making sure everyone knew what she was, what they were together, what legacy means when it’s measured in changed minds and fearless laughter and the courage to keep making noise in the dark.