COMEDY

50 COMIC IDENTITYThe trickster has a religious significance in some cultures that takes adidactic form. Here is an example of a tale featuring ‘Coyote’, a tricksteroften found in the Native American cultures of the southwestern UnitedStates:Hearing a strange sound coming from an old elk skull, Coyotelooks inside and finds a village of Ants having a Sun Dance. Hemakes himself small in order to get inside the skull and see better,but presently his body returns to normal size and his head is stuckinside the skull.He wanders into a village and announces, ‘I am holy; I havesupernatural power; you must give me something!’ The awestrickenpeople pass him in a procession, marking him with pollenas is customary in that region. But the last person in line is asmart aleck boy who is carrying a stick behind his back. When hereaches Coyote he brings the stick down with all of his mightacross the old elk skull, and it cracks and falls off. ‘That’s whatyou should have done long ago’, Coyote tells them, ‘but insteadyou wanted too much supernatural power.’(Hynes and Doty, 1993:3)Only after Coyote has been confronted by an equally irreverentadversary does his greed become an admonition of the villagers’gullibility and a warning to treat supernatural events with caution. Inthis resides Coyote’s moral ambiguity: he rightly berates the people, butonly after his attempt to cheat them has failed. William Hynes andThomas Steele see the trickster as a necessary by-product of socialorder:Systems normally busy generating firm adherence to their beliefsalso maintain within these belief systems, somewhatcontradictorily, a raft of tricksters who perpetually invert andprofane these same beliefs. In myth and ritual tricksters seem tobe officially sanctioned exception clauses by which belief systemsregularly satirize themselves.(Hynes and Steele, 1993:160)The trickster, then, provides an integral check on beliefs to prevent themfrom becoming too secure in themselves.Trickster figures are everywhere in comedy from disguised lovers tolegacy-hunting rakes. Obvious examples would include the cartoon