COMEDY

COMIC IDENTITY 49fool’s prophecy imagines the disarray England will fall into when viceis no longer a part of everyday life:When slanders do not live in tongues,Nor cutpurses come not to throngs,When usurers tell their gold i’th’field,And bawds and whores do churches build,Then shall the realm of AlbionCome to great confusion;(Shakespeare, 1989:3.2.87–92)The parting speech is indebted to Erasmus’s Folly in its belief thatselfdelusion and hypocrisy are integral to the health of the nation. Thiscentral contradiction, the inversion of the good and the bad, the wiseand the foolish, and the mad with the sane, lies at the heart of the‘eccentric’ vision of comedy, where thoughts and experiences cancoexist alongside ironic reflection on those same thoughts.TRICKSTERSParadoxical folly has a close relative in a character known as the‘trickster’ who appears in the folk tales and religious myths of manycultures. Mythical tricksters include the Greek god Hermes, a liar, athief, and a master of disguise; St Peter, who appears in Italian folk talesas a shiftless opportunist whose quasi-criminal activities have to becontinually remedied by patient and forgiving Jesus; the Norse godLoki, the companion of the thunder god Thor and personification oflightning; the Native American Coyote, a sacred progenitor, manicomnivore, and externalized taboo; and the Yoruba Esu-Elegabara fromNigeria, a figure who carries the desires of man to the gods, and wholimps ‘precisely because of his mediating function: his legs are ofdifferent lengths because he keeps one anchored in the realm of thegods while the other rests in this, our human world’ (Gates Jr, 1988:6).The trickster is a practical joker, a witty and irreverent being whoviolates the most sacred of prohibitions. The trickster is not confined byboundaries, conceptual, social, or physical, and can cross lines that areimpermeable to normal individuals, between the living and the dead, forexample, or to travel between heavenly and human worldsinstantaneously. This is why, like Hermes, the trickster often doubles asthe messenger of the gods.