COMEDY

COMIC IDENTITY 47human nature and without it, social interaction would be unbearable.Consider marriage, for example:Goodness me, what divorces or worse than divorces there wouldbe everywhere if the domestic relations of man and wife were notpropped up and sustained by the flattery, joking, complaisance,illusions and deceptions provided by my followers!…In short, noassociation or alliance can be happy or stable without me. Peoplecan’t tolerate a ruler, nor can a master his servant, a maid hermistress…unless they sometimes have illusions about each other,make use of flattery, and have the sense to turn a blind eye andsweeten life for themselves with the honey of folly.(Erasmus, 1993:35)Folly, in this case wilful blindness or the willingness to believeconvenient fictions, is an essential component of a happy life; humanityis utterly dependent on it. Erasmus intended The Praise of Folly as asatire, a comic version of his On the Education of a Christian Prince(1516). Through the technique of praising that which is to becondemned, he produced a powerful ironic identity devoted to comicdefamiliarization as a means of revealing the truth. Folly, for example,is the only person able to speak freely to monarchs,It might be said that the ears of princes shun the truth, and thatthey steer clear of wise men for the simple reason that they fearthere may be someone outspoken enough to risk saying what istrue rather than pleasant to hear. The fact is, kings do dislike thetruth, but the outcome of this is extraordinary for my fools. Theycan speak truth and even open insults and be heard with positivepleasure; indeed, the words which would cost a wise man his lifeare surprisingly enjoyable when uttered by a clown. For truth hasa genuine power to please if it manages not to give offence, butthis is something the gods have granted only to fools.(Erasmus, 1993:56–57)The notion of truth emerging in the guise of folly is clearly visible in thework of Shakespeare, where a fool’s licence serves a number ofdramatic ends. In theatrical practice, the concepts of folly and clowningoverlapped considerably. A ‘clown’ meant literally a person from thecountry, a yokel whose rusticated ways were cause for mirth.‘Clowning’, however, indicated a number of performing skills, such as