Nobel Prize Winner Fo Lampoons His Critics

Clearly relishing the controversy his Nobel Prize has provoked, Dario Fo, the Italian comic actor-playwright, delivered an off-the-cuff performance Sunday before the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, trumpeting the virtues of jesters through the ages.

Instead of a formal lecture, the 71-year-old satirist distributed 25 pages of caricatures and doodles, lampooning critics who had derided the academy for bestowing its illustrious Nobel Prize for Literature this year on a trouble-making iconoclast.

Fo is best known for his one-man show “Mistero Buffo,” and his 1970 play “The Accidental Death of an Anarchist.” A Communist who was denied entry into the United States until 1984, he uses a mix of pointed sarcasm and slapstick comedy to pillory all forms of authority, from the pope to politicians, and to promote political causes.