Antony Scaramucci, a wealthy financier, Trump sycophant and, as David Brooks put it on the PBS NewsHour yesterday (7/21), a “bro,” is, as everyone knows by now, the new White House communications director. After hearing his appointment announced, it took me some time to figure out why his name seemed so familiar. It finally came to me, dredged from my spotty memory of college lit courses, that he has a namesake in the Italian commedia dell’arte stock character, Scaramuccia, or, more popularly, Scaramouche. Funny thing is, If you bother to look up the theatrical Scaramuccia, you might think you’re reading about “our” Scaramucci.
Commedia dell’arte, if you’ll forgive a brief and no doubt over-simplified definition, was a highly stylized theatrical genre that probably developed in Italy in the 16th century. Although it had formal aspects, it was largely improvisational, and frequently demonstrated a satirical bent. According to Wikipedia it relied on a set of stock characters who were believed to represent, in exaggerated form, “fixed social types.” Wikipedia defines the main categories of these characters as “servants, old men, lovers, and captains.”
The Scaramuccia character, literally the “Little Skirmisher,” belongs to the servant catagory or zanni, and is usually a clown figure (zanny?). Wikipedia adds that Scaramuccia also played the role of “masked henchman” or Capitano. Merriam Webster defines Scramuccia more succinctly as “1. a stock character in the Italian commedia dell'arte that burlesques the Spanish don and is characterized by boastfulness and cowardliness,” or “2. a: a cowardly buffoon; b: rascal, scamp.” Does it seem at all likely that we may be closing in on a word picture of the new communictions director here and his relationship with the object of his frequently reiterated“love,” Donald Trump?
Dana Milbank captured the essence of Scaramucci’s inner Scaramuccia in his brief recap of his first press appearance as the White House communications director:
In comes Trump pal Anthony Scaramucci, financier and Fox News chatterbox, named White House communications director Friday. He appeared before the cameras to praise Trump (“he’s genuinely a wonderful human being”), to suspend disbelief (“I actually think the White House is on track and we’re actually, I think, doing a really good job”) and to say that “there is probably some level of truth” even to things Trump says that sound patently false. Asked if he’ll be truthful, he replied, “I hope you can feel that from me just from my body language.
Isn’t it just Scaramucci as Scaramuccia down to a tee? We have Trump’s henchman, his servant, the boastful, flattering clown, a conman who refers us to his “body language,” to assure us that he’ll be “truthful” when called upon to represent the inveterate liar in the White House, even though he knows that we know better than to trust an actor’s body language. In short, he’s clearly a buffoon, a scamp and a rascal. And maybe we’ll even learn that he’s cowardly as well.
Of course, there’s a moral to the tale of Scaramuccia — he usually ends up being beaten by the Harlequin, or Arlecchino, figure, the other clown prototype, with whom Scaramuccia is often paired. In Punch and Judy shows, which evolved from the commedia, Scaramuccia may even end up beheaded at the hand of Harlequin.
The Harlequin character, it is argued, is derived from a Medieval passion play devil or demon figure, which Wikipedia describes as manifesting “the paradoxical attributes of a dimwitted fool and an intelligent trickster,” and who may put on “a show of stupidity in a metatheatrical attempt to create chaos within the play.” Sound like anyone we know of who is (hint) currently, thanks to a little of that chaos, president of the United States?
Here, I return to Dana Milbank once again, whose column today had the prophetic headline,“Sean Spicer is the latest Trump casualty, he won’t be the last,” and which ended ominously with the declaration that “Scaramucci won’t succeed any more than Spicer.” Donald Trump, by all accounts demands loyalty — or at least sycophancy — but, by the same accounts, he rarely offers reciprocal loyalty, especially when the chaos he creates begins nipping at his own behind.
Scaramucci, of course, won’t literally lose his head or endure actual pummelings. —he’ll likely just lose his self-respect and end with his standing among his peers severely battered. But, hey, all is not lost. After it’s all over, he’ll surely go on and, true to his wish for the ethically diminished Spicer, continue to “make a tremendous amount of money.”