The Trickster as Academic Comfort Food
David Carlyon
The past few decades have witnessed a cultural
love affair with the trickster, the clown who chal-
lenges power. Though ‘‘trickster’’ originally described
a community type identified by anthropologists in
specific indigenous cultures, that neutral description
eventually morphed into praise, especially in the
protesting 1960s. Anyone who looked cross-eyed at
authority became a hero-trickster.
I know the lure myself. In anthropology classes in
the ’60 s, I reveled in instances of the Native American
trickster, with the anti-establishment implications
clear. Then as a clown with Ringling Brothers and
Barnum & Bailey Circus, I enjoyed the glow of being
thought a trickster myself, especially when I snuck in
small doses of political satire. Once, as Ringling’s
‘‘Advance Clown Ambassador,’’ I was picking names
out of a hat for a drawing at a mall. It happened to be
near Washington, DC a few years after President
Nixon’s crimes following Watergate forced him to
resign. As I drew out the slips of paper, I pulled the
name of a boy in front, and then a girl next to him,
which made it look as if those close to me had an
advantage. To reassure the crowd, I ad-libbed,
‘‘Don’t worry, folks, the results have been certified
by Price-Watergate.’’ At the time, I pulled out that
plum and thought, What a good boy am I. A
wandering trickster, I. However, this cherished model
of trickster has significant problems.
As the concept of trickster strays from its origins
in ancient cultures, it becomes lamentably vague.
Anthropologists identified the trickster in the details
of specific behavior in particular cultures. John
Towsen lays out some of those details in his wonderful
book, Clowns, a seminal survey of clowning. He
examines clown behavior among the Hopi and the
Navajo; and looks at ‘‘contraries,’’ members of
various Plains Indian tribes who were sanctioned to
act contrary to tribe norms, riding backwards,
shooting their arrows over their shoulders, and
dressing in rags (6-16). Yet the various specific
behavior investigated by anthropologists using the
scientific tools of their profession has too often
14
inflated into a generalized ideal. So any action that
seems contrary to authority fits this hazy model of
trickster. College freshmen and retirees at lecture
series, writers on culture and cultured nabobs—all
have learned to echo the cliché.
The trickster cliché blends into an older, related
romance, of the jester. Again, historical actuality
morphed into another literary fancy of the truth-
telling comic figure, as the 19th century began to
create romantic images of the medieval period. Sir
Walter Scott’s novel, Ivanhoe (1819), and Mark
Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
(1889) are two literary examples in a century-long
fashion. The jester, comic sidekick in that era’s
medieval mania, was imagined saying to the king
what no one else dared say. Here was the embodiment
of speaking truth to power, the jester, armed only with
wit and insight, taking on the ultimate authority of a
medieval monarch.
England’s leading nineteenth-century circus
clown, William F. Wallett, adopted the new ideal,
calling himself the Queen’s Jester and stating the case
in his 1870 autobiography. He wrote that the mere
fool differed from the jester—such as himself—which
was an honorable position ‘‘filled by an educated
gentleman,’’ with a license to speak truth. ‘‘Like the
wearers of other professional costumes, legal and
clerical, jesters are privileged to say and do many
things which would not be kindly received from
laymen’’ (viii-ix). The notion of this proto-subversive
flourished, anticipating the 1960s trickster. A century
after Wallett, Towsen devoted space in his book on
clowns to what he labels the ‘‘daring political
jester.’’
An even tighter time span shows the process of
aggrandizement in action. In 1951, a century-old Ivan
Turgenev play was reprinted in English translation,
titled A Poor Gentleman. Anticipating Chekhov,
Turgenev’s play took a wry look at the wasted lives
of the landed Russian aristocracy through the title
character, a poor gentleman who lives on the charity
of wealthier connections. He is described a few times

as a ‘‘clown’’ or ‘‘fool,’’ and when he dozes off drunk
at lunch, his companions put a clown’s peaked hat on
his head (187, 200-05, 229). In 2002, the same play in a
new adaptation by Mike Poulton appeared on Broad-
way as Fortune’s Fool. Though this adaptation had not
yet been published at the writing of this article,
audiences were hearing a very different emphasis,
signaled by the new title. The ‘‘poor gentleman’’ has
become ‘‘Fortune’s Fool,’’ a label symbolically align-
ing him with Touchstone, the truth-telling clown at
court in As You Like It, especially in the ironic line
Shakespeare provides, ‘‘Call me not fool till heaven
hath sent me fortune’’ (II.vii.19-20). The text of
Turgenev’s play elaborates that shift in emphasis.
Now, instead of a simple buffoon, the title character is
frequently labeled a ‘‘jester,’’ and described as if he
were at court. While both versions depict the poor
gentleman/Fortune’s fool as pitiable, the 2001 adapta-
tion reveals current cultural notions by making him a
hero in the now fashionable jester mode: Mocked, he
speaks truth to power. In the newer version of the play,
given the cultural imprimatur of a Tony Awardr
nomination, we see the inflation of Turgenev’s poor
gentleman from a mere object of mockery to nearly
heroic stature as a jester. (A translation from 1924, The
Family Charge, shows the same shift to the 2001
version [149, 164-70, 197].)
The vague generality of the comic truth-teller
fades into a second problem with the popular model
of the trickster, its implausibility. Beyond favorite
literary notions and fond theories, has any autocrat
in the world we inhabit accepted criticism simply
because it came from a clown? (The New York Times
reported that the King of Tongo did name his
investment advisor ‘‘court jester,’’ but the mockery
came after the fact, inadvertently, when the jester-
advisor lost the kingdom $37,000,000.) Try to imagine
Stalin, or Hitler honoring a person who attacked him
with jokes. On a less horrific scale, have any leaders,
outside fiction, tolerated associates who mocked
them? Did Clinton’s White House include an official
in charge of ridiculing the President’s libido, or does
the Bush White House employ someone to taunt Bush
about his use of English? Can academics envision a
department chair chuckling happily as a professor in a
squirting tie runs into a faculty meeting to jeer about
the way the chair runs the department? Yet if we can’t
conceive of it in our own time, why do we believe that
autocratic power a few centuries ago, in the form of a
medieval monarch, would allow mockery simply
because it came dressed in a motley costume?
Beyond vagueness and implausibility lies a larger
problem: Lack of evidence. Wallett’s autobiography
The Trickster as Academic Comfort Food 15
trotted out three examples—William the Conqueror’s
‘‘joculator,’’ Henry VIII’s jester, and the court fool of
James I—but Wallett did not relate any of the
‘‘truths’’ each supposedly told his respective monarch
(viii). Towsen’s book Clowns serves as a source for,
and a model of, historical work yet it too falters in
its examples of alleged truth-telling. Many of his
examples are apocryphal, based on a tale of what
some jester supposedly said to his lord. Towsen
does urge an ‘‘appreciation of the jester’s keen
sense of psychology,’’ but the instance he offers
comes from fiction, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
Townsen’s third group of examples, after apocrypha
and fiction, are anecdotes in which a jester is protected
as he mocks those not in favor. This is not speaking
truth to power but on behalf of power, against
outsiders (26-30).
The invocation of Twelfth Night reminds us how
much Shakespeare’s fictional universe still helps create
our own. Among other things, he provided prototypes
for our romance of the truth-telling clown such as
Touchstone in As You Like It. Then there is the Fool in
King Lear, the perfect image of a jester saying—and
getting away with saying—what an arrogant ruler does
not want to hear. Shakespeare also supplied a creed,
again in As You Like It. There, the melancholy Jacques
expresses his ambition to become the court fool:
‘‘Invest me in my motley. Give me leave to speak my
mind and I will through and through cleanse the foul
body of the infected world.’’ Though that expresses this
age’s cultural belief, Shakespeare had other ideas and
gave the Duke an immediate retort, that Jacques
embodies the evils he would criticize (II.viii.64-69).
Shakespeare did employ the cultural belief in a truth-
telling jester, but his fools and their words served his
dramatic purpose, they did not record history.
Historically, veneration for the truth-telling
iconoclast increased in the nineteenth century as
society industrialized. In earlier ages, physically or
mentally impaired people—some employed as jes-
ters—had been called ‘‘naturals’’ because they were
ill-adapted to function in society. Nature was then
considered a lower state of being. However, as the
Romantic era decided that the regimentation of
industrialization made society ill adapted itself,
‘‘natural’’ flipped on its head, coming to mean an
inner, freer and theoretically more ‘‘real’’ self. Along
the way, the jester became symbolic, as more ‘‘real’’
himself, a force against a stale, unquestioning,
regimented life. We see a variation of that in Dickens’
novel, Hard Times (1854), in which he poses a joyous,
spirit-enhancing circus against mind-numbing forces
of industrialization.
16 Journal of American & Comparative Cultures
Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the ‘‘carnivalesque’’
as a literary invitation to inversion is another obvious
influence. However, a scholar points out that Bakhtin
denied that carnivalesque inversion applies in perfor-
mance (Wise 15-22). Regardless, theater writers
continue to blur Bakhtin’s literary insights into the
vague claim that performers ‘‘invite’’ audiences to
inversion, a claim—like that made for the trickster—
more easily asserted than demonstrated.
Regardless of the vagueness of the claims,
implausibility, and the absence of documented
instances, this alleged truth-teller survives in an
apparent cultural need to believe in them. One major,
political instance appears in Joel Schecter’s book,
Durov’s Pig: Clowns, Politics and Theatre. Schecter
organizes his book around the image of Vladimir
Durov challenging German authority with his pig.
Durov apparently used ventriloquism to make his pig
seem to say, ‘‘I am Wilhelm,’’ a mockery of the
Kaiser. Allegedly arrested over the incident for
treasonous satire, Durov was then defended by a
socialist lawyer active in opposition to the Kaiser.
However, in a footnote, Schecter reveals many
uncertainties in the account: The original source is a
critic’s tale in an un-dated book; Vladimir himself did
claim credit for the event but so did his brother,
Anatoly; court records only show imprisonment but
not the cause; neither brother appeared to have been
otherwise political, yet each one related this tale to
make himself look good, always a caution flag to
historians; the year that Vladimir claimed he was
arrested, his alleged activist lawyer—whom Vladimir
misnamed—was otherwise occupied at his own trial
for treason (1-4, 213-14). (Moreover, the joke is an old
one. A noted nineteenth-century circus proprietor,
W. C. Coup, told of immigrant Germans in the
Midwest taking offense at a circus pig called
‘‘Bismarck’’ [243].) This is not to criticize Schecter
for inaccuracy; the embellishments are apparently
based on an actual event. Nevertheless, it is emble-
matic of the trickster problem that Schecter’s primary
example, the central image of his title, is laced with
uncertainty.
The same trickster-like idealization was draped
on Dan Rice decades after his death. Rice (1823-1900)
was a famous circus clown who strode beyond the
raucous, adult world of circus in the years before the
Civil War into public prominence. His songs and ‘‘hits
on the times’’ garnered him so much notice that he
became a public figure, ultimately running for
political office, all from the circus ring. Nevertheless,
despite a fame that matched or exceeded that of any
American of his time, Rice eventually found himself
pushed into sentimental fictions and then obscurity.
Two factors propelled his decline. First, the nature of
performance changed through the century, from the
rowdy, participatory dynamic that Rice had ridden
high in the 1840s and 1850s, to the quiet decorum
increasingly expected of ‘‘polite’’ audiences. (That
emphasis on decorum became so settled that it
highjacked history, coming inaccurately to seem
ancient and inevitable, as if ‘‘artistry’’ had always
demanded it.) Second, the course and outcome of the
Civil War forced Rice to explain away his Peace
Democrat politics, and then hide them in fictions that
dissipated the good will he had built in the antebellum
years.
Yet, as the culture increasingly sentimentalized
clowns as figures of fun, fictions took hold. In the late
nineteenth century, Rice lived to see himself senti-
mentalized as ‘‘Old Uncle Dan,’’ the children’s
favorite. His raucous adult appeal dwindled into
what would now be called ‘‘spin,’’ including the
claims that he had generated the phrase ‘‘on the
bandwagon’’ as a political phrase, that he had helped
elect Zachary Taylor (Carlyon 77-79, 332), and that
he had been best friends with Abraham Lincoln (chs.
28-33, 39). This last fantasy has had the most staying
power. (Another assertion, that Rice was the model
for Uncle Sam, is more complicated: Thomas Nast, in
whose cartoons the Uncle Sam icon came to fullest
fruition, was an ardent Republican who would not
have used the prominent Democrat Rice as a model.
Nevertheless, Rice’s national prominence would have
made him an influence on anyone drawing an image
of the national icon, and Uncle Sam is now the
spitting image of Rice, who sported top hat, a famous
goatee, and striped clothes [ch. 39].)
The 20th century saw a new addition to accreted
images of Rice, fitting newer cultural currents. From
sentimentalized clown, he began to emerge as the
great American trickster. In a biographical article,
Ron Jenkins characterized Rice as an anti-establish-
ment trickster, a truth-teller who ‘‘invited’’ audiences
to challenge authority. In particular, Jenkins depicted
Rice fighting to free the slaves (88).
But Dan Rice built his phenomenal success by
matching the conventional wisdom of his time, not by
standing against it, and certainly not by attempting to
subvert it. Rice did mock politicians but that fits the
generic way that all comedians, and most Americans,
joke about politicians. Politicians themselves even
exploit the jokes, scoring political points by jeering at
other politicians for being political. Whatever Rice’s
general jests, he aligned himself with power. An 1849
publicity biography, Sketches from the Life of Dan

Rice, presented him as the jovial companion of
members of the Pennsylvania Legislature, and
carousing with leading Mobile politicians (31,
48-56). In 1856, the Spirit of the Times alerted
its readers that Rice would arrive in Washington,
where he would address the politicians ‘‘now in
wise counsel assembled,’’ and he himself regularly
used the same tones of flattery. Throughout
his career, he claimed to be friends with mayors,
Senators, governors and U.S. Presidents. He was no
trickster-outsider.
Eventually Rice pushed his opposition into the
political arena. As a talking clown, he had always
made politics a vital part of the vibrant stew of
opinions he offered in the circus ring, but during the
Civil War he attacked Republican policies in running
for office himself as a Peace Democrat. While
Republicans denounced him and other Democrats
as ‘‘Copperhead’’ traitors, Rice espoused the same
doctrines that Gen. George B. McClellan used in
running for President against Lincoln in 1864. Rice’s
three campaigns included one for the Pennsylvania
state legislature that year, and later a brief run for
the Presidency. Again, Rice’s was no trickster-like
challenge to power, but a politician’s assertion of a
political agenda.
As for freeing slaves, Rice did not advocate
abolition but fought it, using his comic powers to
ridicule the idea. (He did ultimately revise his opinion
to support abolition.) Even in this reprehensible stand
against abolition, Rice was posing no trickster-like
challenge to the majority, because into the Civil War,
the majority believed the same thing. When Rice
joked about abolitionists as crackpots trying to
destroy the country, he spoke the opinion of
most of his fellow citizens who could not face
America’s original sin of slavery. Racism was a major
part of that majority displeasure with abolition but it
should be noted that some Democrats, including
Rice, stood on principle too, based on the Constitu-
tion’s acceptance of slavery —and on anxiety over the
extremists who burned the Constitution in public
gatherings, declaring they’d accept the destruction of
the country.
The attempt to recreate Rice as a trickster
challenging power suggests the worst problem of the
trickster model: While it can be depicted as a
challenge to power, it more often reinforces power.
Comedy, for all its satirical possibilities, upholds
authority more often than it subverts it. Comedy
thrives on difference, and the powerless sport the
most obvious differences, making the most obvious
targets. That is why Towsen’s include jesters who
The Trickster as Academic Comfort Food 17
derided people out of favor at court. That is why
Americans have historically tossed around so many
jokes about people of color, women, immigrants,
ethnic groups, and gays and lesbians. Consider David
Letterman. Despite his reputation as a provocateur,
his jokes essentially uphold the status quo, mocking
those that his college-educated audience enjoy seeing
mocked. His most reliable comic targets are his
corporate bosses, yet those are the same people
paying him millions of dollars.
Though cultural reasons for this contemporary
love affair with the trickster lie beyond the scope of
this paper, it is suggestive that this now-venerated
image has arisen in an age that sees itself as rebellious,
ready to challenge authority. Notice that those
celebrating the alleged truth-teller generally agree
with the alleged truths.
Popular culture embraces a sentimental image
of the clown; writers reproduce that sentimentality
in the jester, and academics in the Trickster. While
it may be satisfying to confer laudatory labels on
those with whom we agree, it falters as analysis.
Cut loose from anthropologically-specific cultures,
this symbol of subversion becomes ahistorical,
more polemical argument than carefully analyzed
instance. Using the notion of the trickster can aid
understandings of performance but to apply it
indiscriminately mingles the overtly political and the
generally comic, diminishing the former and bloating
the latter. The trickster, symbol of challenge, flips
upside down to become a cliché, serving up comfort-
ing fiction.
Works Cited
Carlyon, David. Dan Rice: The Most Famous Man You’ve
Never Heard Of. New York: Public Affairs, 2001.
Coup, W C. Sawdust and Spangles. Chicago: Stone, 1901.
Jenkins, Ron. ‘‘Dan Rice.’’ Theater 14.2 Spring 1983:
86-92.
‘‘The Money Is All Gone in Tonga, And the Jester’s Role
Was No Joke.’’ New York Times 7 Oct 2001: A22.
Schecter, Joel. Durov’s Pig: Clowns, Politics and Theatre.
New York: Theatre Communication Group, 1985.
Sketches from the Life of Dan Rice. Albany: 1849.
Spirit of the Times 19 Jan. 1856: 577.
Towsen, John. Clowns. New York: Hawthorn, 1976.
Turgenev, Ivan. ‘‘A Poor Gentleman.’’ Trans. Constance
Garnett. Three Famous Plays. London: Gerald
Duckworth & Co., and New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1951. 171-235.
18 Journal of American & Comparative Cultures
——
‘‘The Family Charge.’’ Trans. M. S. Mandell. The
Plays of Ivan S. Turgenev. New York: Macmillan,
1924. 131-204.
——
Fortune’s Fool. Adapt. Mike Poulton. 2001. Dir.
Arthur Penn. The Music Box Theatre. New York:
30 April 2002.
Wallett, William F. The Public Life of W. F. Wallett, the
Queen’s Jester: An Autobiography. London: 1870.
Wise, Jennifer. ‘‘Marginalizing Drama: Bakhtin’s
Theory of Genre.’’ Essays in Theatre 8.1 (Nov. 1989):
15-22.
David Carlyon, who received a Ph.D. from Northwestern
University, is author of Dan Rice: The Most Famous Man
You’ve Never Heard Of (Public Affairs, 2001).