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A powerful fool

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”

When you think of fools you probably think of fumbling nitwit twittering around juggling duckpins on his unicycle in a weird, jangly hat.

The truth is that court jesters — fools — were chosen for their wit and intelligence, and acted primarily as satirists within the court. Their job was to reflect the folly of man and put it up for scrutiny, to be flayed and investigated, before an audience. Fools were so highly regarded that, at a time when freedom of speech was unheard of among courtisans, it was afforded all but exclusively to court jesters. Freedom of speech is kind of a requirement for satire.

There’s another pretty funny fella who was absolutely at peace with his own foolishness.

Samuel Clemmens wrote, in Eruption, “I am the whole human race without a detail lacking…in myself I find in big or little proportion every quality and every defect that is findable in the mass of the race.”

We tend to spend a lot of time investing in our egos. Which is important, since it’s the ego that bridges the divide between the subconscious self and the outside world, not to mention between our impulses and our better judgement. But to become too invested in ego is to forget our own foolishness.

Some great advice I got toward the end of my undergraduate career, as I was headed into the MFA program at Chatham University, was to “laugh at yourself, before anyone else can.” This was great advice I wish I’d remembered once I got to Pittsburgh. The only one there from a working-class background, with working-class clothes, working-class tattoos, and working-class manners, I immediately felt out of place and under the microscope.

I was out of my element, and I let that sense of social inferiority get under my skin. Rather than embracing it and proudly navigating my first residency as the outsider, I tried not to fit in but to hide altogether, which really didn’t work. Looking back, I can laugh at what an odd bird I was. But at the time it felt really bad to be so obviously below par.

And yet there I was. I’d been selected for the program not based on my undergraduate grades or my income but based solely on the quality of my work. I had more reason to be there than anyone else, because I was there with the least propulsion. I didn’t have the money. I didn’t have the academics. But what I had was enough to do the work of all the various and sundry advantages my cohort had come to the program by way of.

Look, be a fool. The fool is in the best position at court by any means. He’s not the king, so no one’s looking to him to carry any great responsibility. Killing the fool won’t get you anywhere, as he holds no tangible power. But the intangible power he does possess? Limitless. It’s the power to see through the game, through the masks, through the veneer of society into the authentic core of everyone around him. Not just that, but to analyze that core and pull up laughable qualities for inspection, reflect them back to others and, with some luck, give them the insight they need to change their follies and improve their lives.

I’m reminded of one other literary example of foolishness. The God of contemporary humor, if you ask me, is David Sedaris. I can only dream of one day being able to write like him. His satire will gut you, stuff you full of priceless insight and wisdom, and then sew you back up in better shape than you were to begin with. He is as adept at casting juvenalian satire on himself as he as at casting horatian satire on the world, and by being brash and scathing on his own folly, he helps readers see the folly of the world around them in a way that makes them laugh rather than weep. And he’s a man whose background isn’t one that often winds up as a fairy tale.

Sedaris can make fun of every single person in a room and they’ll wait 10 hours afterward to shake his hand and collect a signature from him. How much more powerful can a person be?

The fool who knows he is a fool, who is unabashed to admit it, is the most powerful person at court.

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