Zanni

Zany comes from Italian zanni, the Venetian dialect form of Giovanni — the Italian equivalent of John. In the commedia dell'arte tradition, the zanni were the servant characters: the lowest social class on stage, defined by their physical energy, their hunger, their cunning, and their willingness to do anything to survive or to please. Because they were 'every Giovanni' — everyman — they were the most flexible characters in the tradition, capable of any attitude, any voice, any pratfall.

The zanni characters — which included Arlecchino (Harlequin), Brighella, Pulcinella, and dozens of regional variants — were the real engines of commedia dell'arte. The noble characters (the Innamorati, the Dottore, the Pantalone) spoke proper Italian and moved with dignity. The zanni spoke dialect, tumbled, screamed, chased, ate voraciously, and made the audience laugh. They were explicitly lower-class in their origins and their behavior, and that lowness was the source of their comic power.

The word entered English in the sixteenth century, initially meaning a servant-clown or a buffoon who mimicked his master's actions for comic effect. Shakespeare uses it: in Love's Labour's Lost, a character is described as 'some mumble-news, some trencher-knight, some Dick, that smiles his cheek in years, and knows the trick to make my lady laugh, when she's dispos'd to Zanies.' By the seventeenth century the word was naturalizing into English social vocabulary.

The transformation from noun to adjective — from 'a zany' (a specific type of comic servant) to 'zany' (an adjective describing that kind of energy) — happened gradually through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Today 'zany' is among the most cheerful adjectives in English: spontaneous, unpredictable, charmingly absurd. The desperate servant-clown who would do anything not to starve has been translated into an adjective for inspired silliness.