Phobia means fear and Fear includes in its root the Indo-European -pat, which means to beat, to knock down. We could say that fears bring us down and that we are daily beaten by phobia. This is not a good start for a comic monologue.
Laughter, however, is the language we need to enter into one of the most topical, challenging and least discussed topics of this historical moment: fear as a social rudder. We went from John Paul II's ‘Don't be afraid’ to ‘Stay at home’ in the blink of an eye, from ‘Everything will be fine’ to watchful waiting. Ever since the days of the boogeyman, every year a new subject has been produced that will have to get us under its skin.
When I was a kid, you had to be afraid of Chernobyl, then there was Mad Cow, arsenic in the water, Jehovah's Witnesses. Then came the Muslims and after 2001 if you saw an Arab who made the unwise choice to buy an Invicta briefcase, you were able to walk away with a record to make Usain Bolt cry.
Then the immigrants arrived, but now nobody fucks them anymore because there is the virus, the swine plague and, if that wasn't enough, a nice war. But we are not satisfied with the scary proposals from the media hype: we want more! And also thanks to the climate of world terror, we get rid of personalised phobias that beat us with a thousand sticks: snakes, spiders, aeroplanes, venereal diseases, bacteria of all kinds, and much more scary and ridiculous stuff that is justified with ‘Sorry, it's just that I have a phobia!'
Fiabafobia is a series of short stories that investigates the phobias that accompany us, sometimes for a lifetime, sometimes more than relatives.