COMEDY

46 COMIC IDENTITYineffable folly of status in ritual form. As the theologian Peter L.Bergerwrites, folly enabled a magical transformation of the world, or ‘moreprecisely’, was ‘ an act of magic by which a counterworld [was] made toappear’ (Berger, 1997:193). Yet foolishness for its own sake wasneither condoned nor encouraged. Medieval scholasticism made adistinction between the natural and the artificial fool: the first categoryreferred to someone who was considered a ‘holy innocent’, a child or anadult with a learning disability, whereas the second referred to those‘who counterfeited this state in order to amuse others…in short, allclowns’ (Palmer, 1994:43). While clowning was not considered to be asanctified form of folly, but was equated with vice and sinfulness, theidea of folly as the purifying antidote to human pretension developed asa strong theme in literature. As folly was a conventionalized means ofexpressing human nature, it could also be adopted as an ironic andparadoxical identity assumed for the purposes of social commentary andsatiric attack.At the close of the Middle Ages, folly became a distinct literaryvoice, mocking pretension and belittling pride. One of the mostsignificant texts of this kind is Flemish writer Sebastian Brant’sNarrenschiff (1494), or Ship of Fools, a long and popular moral satirethat castigated people from all walks of life for their vanity andhypocrisy. Brant’s conceit of doomed passengers haplessly sailing tothe Land of Fools allowed him to parade a catalogue of social types whofailed to meditate on their eternal fate. Brant’s text lacks humour,although it was published with a series of lively comic illustrations, butits device of social panorama was employed by a masterpiece of ironicfool literature, Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly (1511 and 1515).Desiderius Erasmus, the great Dutch humanist and reformer, took theidea for his text from the name of his good friend Sir Thomas More,which, he says, ‘is as near to the Greek word for folly, moria, as you arefrom it’ (Erasmus, 1993:4). The Praise of Folly is in turns an ironic,ambiguous, and viciously satirical lecture on the benefits of follydelivered by Folly herself. Addressing a happy and receptive crowdwho applaud her arrival, Folly, the daughter of Money, nursed byDrunkenness and Ignorance and attended by Self-Love, Flattery,Forgetfulness, Idleness, Pleasure, Madness, and Sensuality, explains hercentrality to human affairs. All things are made possible through hermediation, she claims. Peace is the product of flattery, she says,vainglory has resulted in science, wisdom is the fruit of folly as the wiseman is modest, but the fool tries, just as Christ used ignorant apostlesand told them to think like children. Everywhere, folly is a condition of