Fools

Natural Fools

An historically aware concept of the fool embraces a range of actual people reaching back to the Middle Ages and earlier, often associated with mental deficiency, but who also may have deviated physically (such as dwarves and hunchbacks) or through aberrant behavior. A fascination with fools led to their keeping at courts or in private households, with the first recorded instance of a pygmy kept by an Egyptian pharaoh toward the end of the 3rd millennium BCE.

Natural fools are seen as inescapably themselves to a striking degree—the absence of guile or the inability to conform may go some way toward explaining their strange allure over and above their easy targeting for ridicule. The fool's cultural resonances have included correlation with magic, luck, sin, misfortune, protection from evil, clairvoyance, and the divine. Folly also has found common ground with madness; in both cases, irrational thoughts or actions produce the kinds of incongruous or inappropriate frame breaks capable of generating laughter. At the same time, these perceived mental states have been associated with a sort of shadow wisdom or clarity of vision.

The fool figure also maintains a moral ambivalence, a natural agent of neither good nor evil. An ambiguous mix of the pathetic and laughable, the real-life fool might be simultaneously revered and reviled. Fools under court or household protection might have been lavishly kept, physically mistreated, or both.

Artificial Fools

Fools and folly gained prominence in European thought of the 14th and 15th centuries, increasing opportunities for artificial fools to exploit the alternative sense-making and protected status of natural fools and thereby make livings in courts, public places, and private households. The artificial fool figure is strongly aligned with the function of the court jester, to the extent that the terms were used interchangeably in the past. Fools were kept to provide amusement on command, privately or socially. The artificial fool directed ridicule at life, society, at a patron's guests or rivals or—daringly— at the patrons themselves. They could impress with sharp insights and audacious put-downs, sometimes [Page 244]veering toward the coarse or offensive, and occasionally suffering dismissal, banishment, or execution as a result. Beatrice Otto (2001) finds histories of jesters in China, India, the Middle East, Japan, Africa, and the Americas, with later sightings in New Zealand and Polynesia. Otto describes modern-day instances of wealthy business figures who retain employees charged with providing jester-like distraction.

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