I wear not motley in my brain!   – Feste (The Fool) Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

The Fool lays bare the folly of the world,often challenging those in power. His status as a non-entity (he’s only afool!) serves as both protection and provocation. The pied or motley costume in the European tradition reflects the patchwork of skills the professional Fool uses to reveal a sometimes-bitter truth. With a little ditty to wrap it in nonsense, some juggling to keep multiple ideas in the air, and a sharp mind to turn words inside out, the Fool must be ready to make a quick exit if the barbs get too sharp!

There are vibrant fools working right now: Stephen Colbert, for instance, uncovers the absurd with his pundit persona on The Colbert Report, his mock news program. Colbert regularly plays with language; several of his neologisms, such as truthiness, have passed into our language.

Now I’m sure some of the “word police,” the “wordinistas” over at Webster’s are gonna say, “Hey, that’s not a word!” Well, anybody who knows me knows I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist, constantly telling us what is or isn’t true, or what did or didn’t happen. (“The Colbert Report,” 10/17/05 )

The word quickly caught the public’s imagination and truthiness was named 2006 Word of the Year by dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster. Speaking truth to power as edgily as the ancient fools addressed the kings, Colbert’s audacious performance at the 2006 Press Association Dinner, in front of President and Mrs. Bush, was a tour de force!

Trickster

Coyote is excrement-corpse-fool-gambler-imitator-witch-hero-savior-god.                                                                                                                             – Karl Luckert, Navaho Coyote Tales

Behind the curtains and through the forests lopes the Trickster, a shadow figure of the gods. Found in cultures around the world, Tricksters embody wiliness and ambiguity. Often they address our appetites for food and sex. Sometimes they trip over their great sexual prowess, or do some gender shifting. Prometheus is a trickster; he tries to deceive Zeus and fails, then steals fire and gives it to humans. Tricksters sometimes assume animal and hybrid forms. Animal trickster figures include Coyote, Hare, and Raven in American Indian cultures; Fox in European folklore; Rabbit in African-American tales; and Tortoise, Spider, and Frog in African folklore. These characters violate customs and taboos, tromping over established ways. Tricksters seem less clever than animals with defined instincts; they make obvious mistakes; but they also are inventive, resilient, and adaptive, imitating habits of others to get out of big scrapes. “These myths suggest that blending natural history and mental phenomena is not an unthinking conflation,” suggests Lewis Hyde. “To learn about intelligence from the meat-thief Coyote is to know that we are embodied thinkers.”

Outcast

You are one of us!                                                                                                                                                 – The Freaks, addressing the Trapeze Artist, in Tod Browning, The Freaks

“The Outsider is [someone] who has awakened to chaos,” Colin Wilson writes. Whether by withdrawing voluntarily, or being exiled from society, the Outcast has a perspective on human behavior and customs that those on the inside do not have. When King Lear is cast out from civilization and wanders into the wilderness, his Fool can no longer help or comfort him. Instead it is the madman, Poor Tom, who illuminates Lear’s understanding. “Is man no more than this?” asks Lear. “Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.”

The figures who embody the outcast perspective—the mad, the grotesque, the humpback and otherly misshapen, ascetics sitting on mountaintops, pariahs, malcontents, wanderers, dispossessed, bag people—hold up a mirror and reflect back to us our twisted, stunted, and deformed selves. These characters offer a harrowing view of life on the margin: Shakespeare’s Timon, the paintings of Goya and Bacon, the writings of Artaud, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and the inspired rants of the schizophrenic, homeless man on my street. “When we call a person ‘mad,’” Peter J. Wilson admits, “we acknowledge that by the evidence of his behavior he has reached a point at which he is beyond our power to control.” As cut off as the Outcast is from the benefits of companionship, her unsocial behavior and unmitigated expression of freedom can humble us.

Mardi Gras is a controlled riot. People just go totally berserk, lose all their inhibitions. They forget everything they’ve ever been taught in their life. – Sgt. Billy Roth, New Orleans Police Department, Cops

The collective embodiment of the ridiculous appears throughout history and across cultures in folk celebrations, the chaos of Charivari, and carnivals of all kinds. During these events, individuals are permitted to let go of their inhibitions. Social inequities are challenged through parody and satire. In a powerful upending of sacred hierarchy during Europe’s late medieval period, for example, the Feast of Fools annually appointed a Lord of Misrule, who came riding backwards into the church on a donkey, preceded by acolytes waving censors of burning donkey dung.

Every year in Basel, as part of a three-day Carnival, scores of lantern-like floats, decorated with pictures lampooning local and international issues, parade into a main square. Local groups spend months preparing these elaborate floats, and pen caustic poems to send their points home. Bands of drums and fifes, in coordinated costumes and masks, accompany them. Music and rhythm are the driving forces for a shuddering undulation of sensuality and cross-dressing each year in Brazil. Even Halloween in the U.S., though now grossly commodified, offers young and old people the possibilities of disguise, pranks, satire, and social commentary: Trick or treat!

Lotschental is a small village in Switzerland where each winter the power of the vast mountains takes shape in the visitation of the Tschaggata. These crudely masked figures are animated mostly by local boys, disguised to be unrecognizable. In addition to large, crude, grotesque wooden masks, they wear fur skins and belts with huge cowbells phallic and deafening. The Tschaggata are funny and also scary; they exude an exciting and almost dangerous sexual energy. They harass and chase you. They throw snow at you, pull you down, rub snow in your face: the rule is, anything short of drawing blood. If you’re in a café and they come in with a deafening noise and sit down next to you, they may take your food, hug you – and you have to put up with it, even enjoy it! All over the Alps, people have created shapes to articulate the dark chaotic side of life, in balance with the orderliness and self-control for which the region is also known.

The Usefulness of Absurdity

HAMM: We’re not beginning to…to…mean something?                                                                     CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that’s a good one!                                           – Samuel Beckett, Endgame

According to recent studies in neurology, when people are put in situations in which they can’t discern an order, the brain releases neurotransmitters that excite the brain to go further, to figure something out. According to Mary Douglas, “there are several ways of treating anomalies” in our experience. We can ignore or condemn them, or “we can deliberately confront the anomaly and…create a new pattern of reality in which it has a place.”

As we move closer to all the shadow shapes I have been discussing, we laugh with nervousness or amusement or even horror. From the muffled titter to uncontrolled hooting over an open grave, we loosen the hold that rational constraints have on us and we open out into a wider flow of liberating chaos. We experience a positive boost from laughter, which releases toxins and results in an unusual joining of right and left-brain over the bridge of the corpus callosum, stimulating our parasympathetic nervous system, which governs recuperation. Now we have modern science to support what we have known for ages: by exploring this terrain of folly – and practicing belly laughs – we begin to heal!

Wit & Wordplay

One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas.                                                                                   How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.                                                                                                                                       – Groucho Marx, Adventure in Africa

Curiouser and curiouser.                                                                                                                                                                           – Alice, Alice in Wonderland

The shadow shapes contribute to our understanding of the uncontrollable, the chaotic, and the crooked. They do so by every means possible: exaggerated physicality, reordering of social habits, and of course, language.

As children learning to speak and communicate, we delight in language: the sensual pleasure of the infant blowing through her lips, rhythmic nursery rhymes, onomatopoeia, the joyful twists of meaning in riddles and knock-knock jokes. We revel in its power, its magic, its multi-dimensions. But as we grow older, we are encouraged to use a language that is more concrete, with particular, determined meanings; rhyme and metaphor are exiled to slim volumes of poetry.

Puns, rhymes, chop logic and higgledy-piggledy nonsense immediately draw attention to the gaps, shortcomings, and sacrifices we make in the course of creating our social selves — dutifully following agreed-upon rules to make communication efficient and meaningful. Wordplay removes any false security about univocal meaning. It also prevents us from assuming that language is natural and unconstructed. To play with language is to reclaim its mercurial nature, its movement, and to empower ourselves as humans.

© Merry Conway, 2011. All rights reserved