# 12. Humor as Resistance - The Court Jester

The court jester is one of history's most misunderstood figures. Not merely an entertainer, the jester was the only person in the medieval court licensed to tell the king the truth — to mock power, puncture pretension, and name what everyone else was forbidden to say. In this episode, we explore what the jester's role reveals about the relationship between humor and power: how laughter can expose the absurdity of authority, and how authority has always worked to contain, co-opt, and control that laughter before it becomes dangerous.

We examine the jester as a structural feature of political systems — a built-in mechanism for correcting the feedback loops that cause leaders to lose touch with reality. And we ask what it means that modern authoritarian systems have no equivalent: no licensed fool, no sanctioned truth-teller, no court figure whose job is to say the unsayable. That absence, we argue, is not a trivial detail. It is a structural vulnerability — one that history suggests tends to end badly.

Part of an ongoing series on Humor as Resistance — using the history and theory of comedy, performance, and theatrical tradition to illuminate the political dynamics of our current moment.

Transcript

LAUGHTER AS RESISTANCE , Part 2 - Humor, Power and the Art of Speaking Truth

INTRODUCTION

Hi. This is Michael C. Patterson. Welcome to the Flourish In Times of Struggle podcast.

This series is an invitation to think together about how we can stay steady, compassionate, and engaged at a time when cruelty, corruption, and division have become increasingly normalized.  I’ve recently been exploring humor as a tool of resistance and resilience. 

In my first episode on humor, I traced the history of political satire from ancient Athens — from the playwright Aristophanes mocking the warmonger Cleon to Lysistrata's sex strike — and drew two lessons about humor as a tool of resistance. Humor activates the first loop of democratic resistance — it identifies the flaw, names it publicly, and gives that naming social legitimacy. But the second loop — the actual work of fixing what humor has exposed — requires something more. Humor can name the flaw. It cannot always fix it.

Today we continue that exploration with a closer look at one of history's most intriguing institutions: the court jester. And what it reveals about the use of humor as a political tool is both instructive and sobering. 

Humor has no inherent political loyalty. It can be the weapon of the weak — ridicule that strips authority of its dignity and reminds the powerful that they are, after all, merely human. Or it can serve authority's interests, deflecting legitimate anger into laughter, making grievance feel foolish, and teaching people to mock their own suffering rather than resist it.

The institution of the court jester illustrates both sides of this equation. The jester mocks the king but ultimately the humor is co-opted in service of the the king. Humor is a self-correction mechanism but it isn’t always clear what aspects of a social arrangement are being corrected. 

The court jester system took the chaotic, potentially revolutionary power of humor and sealed it inside a magic lamp like a captive jinn — releasing just enough to entertain the court and flatter the king with the appearance of tolerance, while ensuring the laughter never became too dangerous. The jester could mock power. He could never threaten it.

Let’s take a deeper look at the court jester system.  How did it operate?

THE ROLE OF THE COURT JESTER

The court jester had explicit permission to mock the king. In a court where everyone else was required to perform loyalty — and performance was the point, regardless of what lay beneath it — the jester had a singular license: to perform disloyalty. To say the unsayable. To name what everyone knew but no one else dared speak. It was, of course, a performance of disloyalty that the king had commissioned, paid for, and retained the right to dismiss as mere entertainment. Which made it, in the deepest sense, the most loyal performance of all.

The jester was far more than an entertainer. He was an instrument of governance, performing several functions that the king found genuinely useful.

The jester was the bearer of bad news — the one messenger the king wouldn't kill. Throughout history, those who delivered unwelcome news to powerful men did so at their peril. The jester's comic license solved this problem. Bad news arrived wrapped in a joke, giving the king a face-saving way to receive it — he could laugh rather than rage, absorb the information rather than punish its delivery.

In 1340, the French fleet of King Philippe VI was destroyed by the English navy — one of the most catastrophic military defeats in French history. Ships sunk, sailors drowned, the pride of France humiliated. No courtier dared bring the king this news directly. The jester was given the task. His challenge: how do you tell a king that his navy has been annihilated?

His solution was to turn the French defeat into an English insult. He told the king: "The English sailors don't even have the guts to jump into the water like our brave French." French defeat was repositioned as bravery and English victory as cowardice. The truth was delivered but cushioned with humor. We can imagine King Philippe responding with a pained smile and saddened eyes. He understood. The English had prevailed. His sailors had abandoned their ships and drowned.

Any impulse to lash out in frustration was tempered by the ridiculous innocence of his fool. The jester insulated the courtiers from the king's anger. He protected the king's pride. He delivered the painful truth. And kept his head.

The jester was also an early pollster. His performances took place not in private audience with the king, but before the full court. The jesting enabled the king to watch his courtiers as carefully as he watched the jester. Who laughed at the joke about the controversial policy? Who shifted uncomfortably? Who glanced at the king before deciding whether to laugh? The jester's jokes served as probes — a means of sounding out the room, gathering political intelligence about the mood of the court, without the king committing to any position.

The courtiers were watching the king just as carefully — gauging what he would tolerate, what was safe to express, what was dangerous. The jester's joke created a triangulated space in which political information circulated in all directions simultaneously, under the cover of entertainment.

The jester's humor offered the king a palatable method of self-reflection and possible self-correction. The jester could name what no one else would name. He could call attention to the king's vanity, his errors, his dangerous enthusiasms — provided the jibes were cushioned sufficiently in comedy. He was, in this sense, the one figure in the court whose job was to pull the king back toward reality — to keep the royal ego tethered to the actual world rather than the world of flattery and fantasy that surrounded it.

It is worth pausing to appreciate something that is easy to overlook. The court jester system, for all its limitations and co-optations, represented something genuinely valuable in the design of medieval governance: a built-in negative feedback loop. A negative feedback loop is a self-correcting mechanism — like a thermostat that detects an overheating room and triggers the cooling system, or an alarm that warns of danger ahead and prompts a change of course. The system had institutionalized, however imperfectly, a mechanism for detecting when power had drifted from reality and nudging it back. The jester had a seat at the table, a salary, a costume, and a license. The possibility of correction was written into the architecture of the court.

Modern authoritarian systems have eliminated this feature entirely. They are constitutionally humorless — not by accident or personal preference, but by structural necessity. The tyrant constructs an echo chamber of his own design — surrounding himself with flatterers, controlling the information that reaches him, ensuring that no corrective signal penetrates the wall of confirmation and praise. Within that echo chamber, the posture of infallibility can be maintained indefinitely. And humor is the most dangerous threat to that posture — because a joke punctures it. To laugh at power is to acknowledge, however briefly, that power is not what it claims to be. That the emperor has no clothes. That the infallible leader is, in fact, fallible. An authoritarian system cannot permit that acknowledgment in any form. The self-correcting crack in the seal must be welded shut.

Without a mechanism for detecting when the system's internal logic has drifted from reality, something dangerous takes over: positive feedback loops. Remember, we said negative feedback loops correct — they push back against drift and restore balance. Positive loops do the opposite. They amplify. They confirm. They take the leader's existing worldview and feed it back to him, louder and more insistently each time, until the gap between the narrative and the actual widens beyond recovery.

The court jester, imperfect and co-opted as he was, represented one small mechanism for keeping that spiral in check. His absence in modern authoritarian systems is not a trivial detail. It is a structural vulnerability — one that tends, historically, to end badly.

Shakespeare's King Lear contains the most searching portrait of this dynamic in all of literature. The Fool is the only character who consistently tells Lear the truth — that he has foolishly divided his kingdom, that his daughters are deceiving him, that he has surrendered the power that protected him. Everyone else flatters or deceives. The Fool speaks in riddles and songs and jokes — the only register in which truth can be delivered to a king not yet ready to receive it directly. He disappears from the play after Act Three with no explanation. The most compelling interpretation: his work is done — and it has failed. The feedback loop did not connect. The truth, delivered in comic form, was received as entertainment and was not sufficient to protect Lear from his own folly. The door was opened. No one walked through it in time.

This is the first great limit of humor as a tool of resistance: it can open a door. It cannot force anyone through it.

THREE MODES OF POWER AND HUMOR

The court jester system gives us one detailed example of how power deals with humor — and by comparison, it suggests two other relationships that complete the picture.

But before we draw those comparisons, one point about the jester system needs to be stated clearly. Even when the jester's corrective function worked perfectly — even when the king received the uncomfortable truth, absorbed it, and adjusted his behavior accordingly — the self-correction served the king's interests, not the people's. It helped him govern more effectively, avoid catastrophic miscalculations, and maintain his grip on power. It was not designed to produce democratic reform, to challenge the fundamental legitimacy of his rule, or to serve those outside the court walls. The negative feedback loop was a tool of more effective autocracy. The Jinn, even when he escaped the bottle briefly, served the king who held it.

With that in mind — let me suggest three modes of the relationship between power and humor.

The first is co-optation. Employ the jester. Pay him. Costume him. Give him a license and a seat at the table. Turn the self-correcting crack in the wall of power into a managed feature of the system. The humor exists — but inside the bottle. The Jinn is contained. Power doesn't suppress the truth-teller. It hires him, controls the terms of his employment, and retains the right to dismiss everything he says as mere entertainment. The negative feedback loop is present but defanged. The self-correction is possible but deniable.

The second mode is suppression. When co-optation seems too risky, power drives humor underground entirely. This is the totalitarian solution — and it is what Arthur Koestler observed firsthand in the regimes of Hitler and Stalin. No jesters. No licensed fools. No permitted mockery of any kind. As Koestler wrote, with the authority of someone who had survived Franco's prisons: "Under the tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin, humour was driven underground. Dictators fear laughter more than bombs." 

They fear it because they understand what it does — it punctures the posture of infallibility, acknowledges the gap between the narrative and the actual, breaks the echo chamber the tyrant has constructed around himself. Modern authoritarianism goes further still — purging not just humor but every self-correcting mechanism in the system. The courts. The press. The separation of powers. The professional civil service. Every negative feedback loop eliminated. A system hurtling toward whatever the unchecked will of the leader demands, with nothing left to detect the drift or correct the course.

The third mode is the most recent — and the most disorienting. It is the Trump innovation. Power doesn't co-opt humor or suppress it. Power becomes the jester.

Trump has given himself the jester's full license — and removed all limits. The medieval jester operated within carefully negotiated boundaries, always calibrating how far the license extended. Trump operates with no boundaries at all. The outrageous claim, the deliberate transgression, the insult, the provocation — these are not failures of discipline. They are the performance. The endless stream of absurdity is the point.

But Trump's Uber-Jester act does something the medieval jester never did. It doesn't diminish him in his supporters' eyes. It inflates him. Those of you who listened to our episode on the Political Dehumanization Template will recognize this dynamic — the inflation variant, in which a figure is portrayed not as subhuman but as supernaturally powerful, operating outside the constraints that bind ordinary mortals. 

Trump has applied that inflation to himself. He becomes the supernatural entertainer — the man who defies all normal rules, who cannot be stopped, who says what cannot be said and does what cannot be done and gets away with it. The clown shoes, the outrageous claims, the deliberate transgressions — these signal to his supporters not weakness but invincibility. And the promise beneath the performance is profoundly reactionary: the supernatural entertainer who will turn back the clock, restore the lost hierarchy, return the cowboys and the damsels, make the world of the 1950s real again. The humor is the delivery mechanism for a vision of restored white male supremacy. The Jinn has escaped the bottle — but he is serving a very old master.

This explains something that has puzzled many of Trump's critics: why are his supporters unfazed by his lies? Because they are not receiving them as lies. They are receiving them as the jester's jibes — the transgressive performance of a man so powerful he can say anything and nobody can stop him. The lie functions not as a claim about reality but as a demonstration of power. Fact-checking Trump is as futile as fact-checking a court jester. You cannot refute a performance. The jester's deniability — I was only joking — is built into every outrageous claim. His supporters receive it as entertainment. His critics receive it as deception. He operates in the gap between those two receptions simultaneously — and the gap itself is the weapon.

Here Neil Postman's analysis becomes essential. In his prophetic 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman argued that television had transformed public discourse into an entertainment culture where everything — including politics, news, and civic life — was required above all else to be amusing. Drawing on Aldous Huxley's Brave New World rather than Orwell's 1984: we would not be destroyed by what we feared but by what we loved. A population trained by decades of television to receive political content as entertainment rather than as truth claims requiring evaluation is a population perfectly primed for the Trump innovation. The king who becomes the jester is a new kind of politician. He is the logical endpoint of a culture that Postman saw coming forty years ago.

Trump and the right-wing media ecosystem have added a dimension that goes beyond Postman — what we might call the Grand Guignol element. The Théâtre du Grand-Guignol was a notorious Parisian theater that operated from 1897 to 1962, specializing in graphic horror designed not to entertain or enlighten but to overwhelm — to produce visceral reaction rather than rational reflection. Grand Guignol strives first and foremost for visceral impact rather than meaning. It is, in the theatrical tradition, the precise opposite of what Bertolt Brecht sought with his alienation effect — his deliberate strategy of stripping emotion from theater to prevent audience identification and create space for rational analysis. Brecht wanted critical distance. Grand Guignol destroys it. Trump's political theater is Grand Guignol — a rapid-fire stun gun designed to make rational analysis impossible.

And it works in both directions simultaneously. It paralyzes critics through overwhelm — too much to process, too exhausting to respond to coherently, too relentless to sustain organized resistance against. And it energizes supporters through the performance of transgressive power — the thrill of a leader who says what cannot be said, does what cannot be done, and gets away with it. Critics overwhelmed into paralysis. Supporters organized into attack.

The medieval court had a jester to keep the king tethered to reality. Modern authoritarianism has purged every such mechanism — and tends, historically, to spiral out of control as a result. Trump has gone further still: he has made the untethering the show.

As Postman predicted — we are being amused and entertained to death. The death of democracy. The death of people. The death of the planet.

CONCLUSION

In the next episode on Humor as Resistance\\\\\, we leave the royal court behind and take to the streets. The tradition I'm calling Rude Humor didn't ask permission and didn't observe decorum — from the Commedia dell'Arte and Punch and Judy to the Feast of Fools, it was humor as disruption, as transgression, as joyful assault on the pretensions of the powerful. We'll trace that spirit forward to the Bread and Puppet Theatre, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and the modern carnival of Mardi Gras — and we'll keep asking the question that sits at the heart of this series: when is laughter an act of resistance, and when is it just the safety valve that keeps the whole unjust system running?