Fous et Bouffons: un Etude Physiologique, Psychologique et Historique(Fools & Buffoons: A Physiological, Psychological, and Historical Study) by Dr. Paul Moreau
You have to hand it to the French. They have an appetite for historical research and writing, as well as a keen interest in circus and clowning. Put the two together and the happy result is a lot of good books on the variety arts. When I somehow ended up as a French major in my undergrad years at NYU, I had no real idea how or if I would ever use my meager language skills. Four years later I found myself writing a book about clowns, the research for which would have been impossible had I not been able to read French.
So as we near the end of my posting public domain books about fools and jesters, I throw in a book in French on the subject. I figure there are enough of you gringos who read French, and the blog is getting a lot of visitors from francophile countries, so it may be of use to someone out there. And as I may have mentioned, it is free.
Moreau was a member of the Paris Medical Psychology Association and his approach aspires to be scientific. He was in fact the author of over a dozen books that bridge the gap between medical and psychological issues, tackling such subjects as suicide, childhood madness, and jealous insanity. One contemporary review of the book I found questioned Moreau’s science and opined that “the historical section of the book contains many anecdotes which may amuse those who have nothing better to do than to read them.” Zing!
I doubt H.G. Wells knew of Moreau when he wrote Island of Dr. Moreau, but Wells’ mad scientist is none other than Dr. Paul Moreau, played by Charles Laughton in the 1933 film, Island of Lost Souls. But I digress.
It turns out Erasmus is not just the name of a high school in New York City. Apparently before he was a high school — about 500 years before — he was also a famous philosopher.
Hey, I’m just kiddin’ ya. I went to graduate school, I know everything there is to know about Erasmus that’s on his Wikipedia page. Like his full name was Desiderius Erasmus, though his friends called him Razzmatazz, that he was born in Rotterdam some time between 1466 and 1469, died in 1536, and in between established quite a reputation for himself as a Dutch Renaissance humanist.See?
But why was he praising folly? As the forward to this edition says, “under the pleasing mask of Folly our author has uttered truths which are indeed sublime, and in the witty language of the Jester he has exposed the fallacies of ….” Well, the fallacies he exposes are a bit esoteric to us today, having to do with religious controversies raging over the Protestant Reformation. (Good thing we don’t have religious controversies any more.) Erasmus was a Catholic but at one point an ally of Martin Luther and quite critical of the Catholic establishment. Erasmus speaks to us through a voice of his creation, the Greek Goddess ofFolly, a personification of folly and a vehicle for launching satirical attacks on his favorite targets.
The standard entry on fools and jesters usually makes mention of Shakespeare’s jester characters, especially the fool in King Lear. It was Robert Armin (c. 1563 – 1615) who first acted the role as a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, as well as such similar roles as Touchstone in As You Like It, Feste in Twelfth Night, Lavatch in All’s Well That Ends Well, and perhaps Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, as well as comic parts in other Elizabethan dramas. In fact, Armin’s joining the company around 1600 is credited by some with Shakespeare’s increased interest in witty jesters.
Armin was not just a leading actor of his day, but also a scholar with a keen interest in the ancient lineage of fools. He was one of the first to chronicle their history at length in his Foole upon Foole (1605) and his A Nest of Ninnies (1608), where he made a clear distinction between the natural fool and the “licensed fool,” a performer sanctioned to play the role of the fool for money. It would be a logical assumption that, working as closely together as he and Shakespeare did for so many years, Armin shared his historical knowledge with the ever-curious bard.
Even though the text is short (56 pp.), it is rough sledding, given the wacky way they wrote and spelled back in those days. But it is historically significant and, once again, it is free…
This is a 389-page monster of a book written by Dr. John Doran (1807-1878) and published in 1858. Doran was a prolific writer of popular social histories. No illustrations, not even the one to the right.
I used this book when researching chapter one of Clowns, but it should come with a warning: it’s heavily anecdotal, with nothing in the way of footnotes or bibliography. Like a lot of books about fools and jesters, it tends to romanticize its subject and rarely questions the accuracy of a story so long as it’s a good one.
It was republished just last year by Cornell University Library in book form — you know, with double-sided printing, a cover, a binding and all that. Your choice: buy it for $27 on Amazon or download and print it right here.
This was my opening chapter, though actually written towards the end. In it I tried to bring together manifestations of the clown spirit in a wide range of contexts, though with an emphasis on cultures variously labeled as primitive, indigenous,non-literate or non-technological. The argument is that if the Clown Spirit emerges spontaneously amongst these isolated peoples, separated as they are by time and geography, then this spirit must speak to something deep in human nature. Its appearance in more than a few creation myths perhaps offers the strongest proof. It’s great stuff, though the problem is that to do it justice you need to be a seasoned anthropologist, which I’m not, despite several visits to the American Museum of Natural History before the age of twelve. It’s one thing to put together a reasonable narrative about the evolution of the tramp clown figure, and quite another to chart a vaguely defined clown impulse through all of recorded time, especially since it forces you to have to define exactly what it is you mean by “clown” in the first place. So I feel like I’m on shaky ground here, academically speaking, but nevertheless on the right track. Help and suggestions are certainly in order!
Since I started the book by writing about the dances of the Hopi people, and go on to also discuss the Navajo, the Zuni, the Yaqui, the Crow, the Cheyenne, and even Sri Lankan demon plays, I have of course been curious and hopeful that, living in the YouTube generation where everything is supposedly online, some choice ethnographic film might surface showing clown figures in performance, more or less in their native authenticity, uncorrupted by the white man pointing a camera at them. I’m just beginning a serious search, but in the meantime, here’s some stuff… Creation Myths Clown figures do figure prominently in many creation myths, though it’s usually more the clown as trickster than it is the clown as bumbler. The standard text on this when I was writing my book seemed to be Paul Radin’s The Trickster(1956), but since then at least three other books of note have come along, all of which I’m trying to find time for.
First up is Barbara Sproul’s 1979 collection, Primal Myths, an anthology of well over one hundred creation myths from throughout the world. Yes, Genesis is included. Only some of the texts touch on trickster figures, but the scope is impressive, and Sproul’s intelligent and very readable 30-page introduction to the subject is a great way for the layman to understand how these stories function within a society.
Apparently along similar lines is Kimberley Christen’s and Sam Gill’s Clowns and Tricksters, though I haven’t gotten my hands on it yet. Subtitled “An Encyclopedia of Tradition and Culture,” it would seem to be a valuable resource in this area. According to the review in Library Journal, the authors have “created a reference to tricksters and clowns, figures found in cultures and myths worldwide but whose characteristics differ according to the culture in which they originate. The work lists 185 cultures by geographical area, followed by a main section consisting of 194 alphabetically arranged entries related to tricksters and clowns; the entries, which are heavily cross-referenced, cite the name of the character with its culture or country of origin followed by stories or other information. The entries conclude with bibliographic citations, and there is a comprehensive bibliography as well. The scope of this work is vast, covering clowns and tricksters from the ancient world to the present and including some references to cultures that no longer exist as well as material from current popular culture. As the introduction states: ‘This volume is meant as a general introduction to both the characters and the people who see the world through their eyes.’ It succeeds admirably.” For an even broader perspective on the trickster spirit, there’s Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World (1998), which I am currently reading. Hyde is also the author ofThe Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, and has been praised to the skies by David Foster Wallace as “one of our true superstars of non-fiction.” Hyde’s real subject is “trickster consciousness,” which he traces across a broad spectrum, from dozens of folklore myths through the work of such modern artists as Marcel Duchamp, Allen Ginsberg, and Maxine Hong Kingston.
The Feast of Fools The title of the chapter, “Fools, Natural & Artificial,” hearkens back to the middle ages and points to the distinction (or confusion) between those performers who acted the role of the fool for fun and profit, and those who were kept on by the rich and powerful, who found their very real physical and mental deformities amusing.
While this practice seems to have somewhat died out, I would take this opportunity to draw your attention to a NYC-based theatre company I’m fond of that has done a lot of exploration based on the Feast of Fools and the Fool’s Mass. They are Dzieci Theatre, whose roots are in the teachings of Jerzy Grotowski, but whose explorations have included not only the fool’s mass, but burlesque and circus as well. I want to cover more of their work at a later date, but meanwhile here’s a pdf of a full-length article about their work from Ecumenica:
If you’re in the New York area, be sure to check out one of the December 2009 performances of their Fool’s Mass, which are listed here.
Jesters The medieval jester who, like Lear’s fool, could speak truth to power has no doubt been romanticized. I suspect it was not all that common, and that many a “jester” had to shut up or at least tone down their criticism to keep their head attached to their neck. Even in our day and age, freedom of speech is not all it’s made out to be, given the control of the media usually exercised by the rich and powerful inisde or outside the government. That being said, here are two modern examples of comics taking on the powers that be…
Will Rogers The political humor of Will Rogers (1879–1935) seems pretty tame today, yet in his heyday as a star of film and the vaudeville stage, he was unique in his folksy ability to say some pretty nasty things about politicians without having everyone hate him; kind of a lovable Bill Maher. Here’s a clip of Lance Brown as Will Rogers:
Stephen Colbert For me, the most significant moment in modern comedy was Stephen Colbert tearing apart George W. Bush to his face at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. The character he plays on The Colbert Show is very much a jester, as he pretends to espouse a set of views while ripping them to shreds through exaggeration and the recital of inconvenient facts. When I saw the show being taped live, Colbert chatted with the audience beforehand and wanted to make sure they really understood that he was playing a character. (Hey, you never know who’s going to wander in off of West 54th Street.) At the correspondents’ dinner he destroys Bush by praising him, kind of like Mark Antony praising Caesar, only a lot funnier. It’s in three parts…
Chapter 1 from my book, Clowns: A Panoramic History It’s been my intention to get my entire Clowns book up on the blog, but since this is only the second chapter in six months, it looks like I’m going to have to accelerate the pace. [Click here for chapter five.]
There are two problems. One is that scanning a book (yes, it was written in the pre-digital Dark Ages), then correcting all the scanning errors (OCR is still not perfect), scanning the photos, redoing the layout, etc. is a tedious and time-consuming job. Not much fun either. The other obstacle is my silly desire to take a few small steps towards improving the book, both by correcting any errors and by adding supplementary material.
Okay, enough excuses. Here’s a pdf of chapter one, to be followed by a post of supplementary material. And to be followed by chapter two in a lot less than six months!
