Pierrot (French pronunciation:  [pjeRo]) is a stock character of pantomime and commedia dell'arte whose origins are in the late seventeenth-century Italian troupe of players performing in Paris and known as the Comedie-Italienne; the name is a diminutive of Pierre (Peter), via the suffix -ot. His character in contemporary popular culture--in poetry, fiction, and the visual arts, as well as works for the stage, screen, and concert hall--is that of the sad clown, pining for love of Columbine, who usually breaks his heart and leaves him for Harlequin. Performing unmasked, with a whitened face, he wears a loose white blouse with large buttons and wide white pantaloons. Sometimes he appears with a frilled collaret and a hat, usually with a close-fitting crown and wide round brim, more rarely with a conical shape like a dunce's cap.

He is sometimes said to be a French variant of the sixteenth-century Italian Pedrolino, but the two types have little but their names ("Little Pete") and social stations in common. Both are comic servants, but Pedrolino, as a so-called first zanni, often acts with cunning and daring, an engine of the plot in the scenarios where he appears. Pierrot, on the other hand, as a "second" zanni, is a static character in his earliest incarnations, "standing on the periphery of the action", dispensing advice that seems to him sage, and courting--unsuccessfully--his master's young daughter, Columbine, with bashfulness and indecision.  His origins among the Italian players in France are most unambiguously traced to Moliere's character, the lovelorn peasant Pierrot, in Don Juan, or The Stone Guest (1665). In 1673, probably inspired by Moliere's success, the Comedie-Italienne made its own contribution to the Don Juan legend with an Addendum to "The Stone Guest", which included Moliere's Pierrot. Thereafter the character--sometimes a peasant, but more often now an Italianate "second" zanni--appeared fairly regularly in the Italians' offerings, his role always taken by one Giuseppe Giaratone (or Geratoni, fl. 1639-1697), until the troupe was banished by royal decree in 1697.  Among the French dramatists who wrote for the Italians and who gave Pierrot life on their stage were Jean Palaprat, Claude-Ignace Brugiere de Barante, Antoine Houdar de la Motte, and the most sensitive of his early interpreters, Jean-Francois Regnard. He acquires there a very distinctive personality. He seems an anomaly among the busy social creatures that surround him; he is isolated, out of touch. Columbine laughs at his advances; his masters who are in pursuit of pretty young wives brush off his warnings to act their age. His is a solitary voice, and his estrangement, however comic, bears the pathos of the portraits--Watteau's chief among them--that we will encounter in the centuries to come.

What do they have in common?
but the two types have little but their names ("Little Pete") and social stations in common.