Simonetta Musitano: Stand-Up Comedy a Firenze

“Cerco solo divertimento” is the second stand-up comedy show by Simonetta Musitano. Following the success of “Una donna con le palle”, the comedian returns to the stage with a show in which she tells the story of being the black sheep of the family, and above all the black sheep in social settings, for who she is and what she represents: trans, left-wing, vegan, terrona! All in all, an absolute disaster!

Simonetta starts from herself to take apart, with sarcasm and self-deprecating humour, the contemporary obsession with competition, performance and emotional hyper-independence. From job interviews experienced as survival tests, to the difficulty of finding one's place in competitive environments, from sport to Pilates, taken up more out of desperation than vocation. The story moves between physical frailties, inherited anxieties and social expectations that are impossible to meet.

Between sex with men lacking any sexual and emotional education, and dates that fail under the weight of the rhetoric of emotional detachment – ‘I’m fine on my own, I’m starting again from myself’, and indeed ‘I’m only looking for fun’ – the show dismantles the dominant narrative of emotional self-sufficiency, claiming the almost revolutionary desire for a stable relationship.

Getting to know oneself, loving oneself, understanding oneself and becoming self-aware is not a solitary, self-excluding journey, but a collective path in which people suffer together. Mockery of therapy stereotypes is therefore not lacking, from Freud to the obsession with parental figures raised on a diet of generalist TV, from emotional literacy and the fear of therapy, to Freud being seen as the cause of all our ills, and on to social-media psychology and recycled motivational phrases.

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The Simonetta Musitano project was born in Reggio Calabria in 1993, from a man and a woman. But the duo soon splits up, and she realises that all her money will be handed over to the Order of Psychologists.