When talking about stand-up comedy, a lot of attention is given to the figure of the wise fool. This concept is traceable back to at least the middle ages (for more on this, see: Gifford; Gilbert; Goldsmith; Kaiser; McMullen; Stebbins; Welsford). An ironic, paradoxical figure, the wise fool represents an oxymoron, an incongruity, a contradiction or gap between the expected and the received.
As Kaiser notes, “[T]he idea of the wisdom of the fool always stands in contrast to the knowledge of the learned or the “wisdom” of the worldly. In this respect, the oxymoron, “wise fool”, is inherently reversible, for whenever it is acknowledged that the fool is wise, it is also suggested, expressly or tacitly, that the wise are foolish.”
Comics strive to create foolish personae, perhaps especially when they wish to appear wise, for from fools such wisdom and critique is more likely to be judged good-natured and thus funny, rather than mean-spirited or critical and thus not funny. Fools can’t help themselves, thus they can’t be held responsible, and we can always ignore the fool’s points because they are, well, fools.
It also multiplies the possibilities for humor. We can laugh at the fool’s jokes, at the incongruity that the statement came out of this person’s mouth, or at the fools themselves, perhaps out of superiority, and many other ways besides. Common names for wise fools are rubes, buffoons and fish-out-of-water.
However, we can also set ourselves up as wise, and then act foolish.
Political Potential?
Jeffrey P. Jones notes that through wise fools, humor can safely advance “what is often devastatingly honest (and sometimes personally risky) critiques of power” (93). This is the oft-cited ability to “Speak Truth to Power.”
Social contracts
Historically, understanding a person to be crazy or intellectually impaired may have led to a social contract that gave figures such as the court jester a particular, protected place from which to speak to those in power.
However, while the understanding of the jester as a fool sanctioned certain acts, Anton C. Zjiderveld points out that this sanction did not extend to any and all criticism, nor was it iron-clad – fools were always at risk of losing their heads.
Further, it is a common mistake to extend this contract to today’s comics, as Kathy Griffin and others have found. We all have the ability and responsibility to speak truth to power. Comics are objectively neither specially privileged, nor receive special dispensation, as Griffin’s case (and every other that has come before) adequately displays – unless we defend their actions.
No force
The reason acting like a wise fool is supposed to work is because crazy people cannot be responsible for their behavior and therefore their statements can be dismissed. Thus, the same expectation of a joke (intentionality), that defuses risk for the speaker and gives them the ability to “speak truth” may also diminish the force of the message, and thereby the necessity that we act upon it. We do not need to accept the positions of raving madmen or the ponderings of the unbalanced – unless, of course, they are running our government.
In any case, a belief in this situation – in a kind of social contract in which the speaker is not to be believed or blamed, the message is thought to be infelicitous, non bona fide, inert or harmless and in any case, the audience’s laughter trivializes the matter and shows no intention of further action – is almost uniformly applied to humorists to this day (For an expansion on these first two terms, see: Austin; Raskin).
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
References:
Austin, J.L. How To Do Things With Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962
Gifford, D. J. “Iconographical Notes toward a Definition of the Medieval Fool.” The Fool and the Trickster: Studies in Honour of Enid Welsford. Ed. P.V.A. Williams. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1979. 33-41.
Gilbert, Joanne. Performing Marginality: Humor, Gender and Cultural Critique. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 2004.
Goldsmith, R.H. Wise Fools in Shakespeare. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955.
Jones, Jeffrey. Entertaining Politics: New Political Television and Civic Culture. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.
McMullen, D. “The Fool as Entertainer and Satirist on Stage and in the World.” Dalhousie Review 50 (1970): 10-22.
Raskin, Victor. Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Boston, MA: D. Reidel. 1985.
Stebbins, Robert A. The Laugh-Makers: Stand-Up Comedy as Art, Business and Life-Style.Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1990.
Welsford, E. The Fool: His Social and Literary History. New York: Faber and Faber, 1961.
Wilson, Nathan. Was That Supposed to be Funny? A Rhetorical Analysis of Politics, Problems and Contradictions in Contemporary Stand-Up Comedy. Dissertation in partial completion of the Ph.D. August, 2008.
Zjiderveld, Anton C. Reality in a Looking Glass: Rationality Through an Analysis of Traditional Folly. Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.
