The British take their humour very seriously. Shakespeare made the fool the repository of wisdom: witness the fool in King Lear who tells his king, “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.’’ The Fool as a figure in medieval and early modern royal courts turned upside down the existing hierarchy and the prevailing court ritual. He was at liberty to mock the king and to make fun of his courtiers. Insolence was part of his job. His presence was an intrusion of the spirit of carnival into polite society. The Fool provided the king with a distraction and often acted as his conscience. He was part of the royal retinue yet was out of it. The institution of the Fool disappeared with the decline of the monarchy and the emergence of republican forms of government. It could be said that the Fool disappeared as the political system became more wise and mature and thus ceased to be driven by one man’s whims and wishes.

It would appear though that into the 21st century, a section of British society feels the urge to revive the institution of the Fool. English Heritage, a government-funded body, has advertised for a jester. The appointment is intended to bring back laughter and a sense of fun into British social life. The British sense of humour has a unique wry quality. Irony rather than slapstick, wordplay rather than physical clowning, are its hallmarks. The stand-up comic in a music hall and the magazine Punch at one time epitomized the British sense of humour. Television serials like Yes Minister and Black Adder strengthened the idea that nobody matches the British in the ability to laugh at themselves. Hidden by the stiff upper lip of Colonel Blimp is a heart dying to guffaw. These qualities — laughing at oneself, biting irony, wordplay — gave to the British way of life an attractiveness seldom found elsewhere. While the Fool personified all this, he also acted as the king’s conscience. It is possible that English Heritage feels that in Blair’s Britain there is the need to revive a national conscience.

In the 20th century, a little tramp became the Western world’s conscience. He made movie-goers laugh but they all left the cinema halls with lumps in their throats. To survive the tragedies engendered in the name of modernity, one had to laugh at one’s own plight. Poignancy is inherent in the situation of the Fool. The clown makes people laugh only to make them aware of the absurdity of what is considered to be normal. The Fool or the clown pushes people towards transgression by ridiculing society and its norms. The Fool is at the liminality of what is seen as civilization. When Lear, with the clarity given only to the mad, faces the truth, the Fool quietly drops out of the play. Maybe the 21st century needs a Fool to mock it and make it face itself.