It Begins With Perspective

How to begin? A recollection of John Lennon’s quip, “sometimes I play the fool,” along with an imagined dialogue between two unnamed social actors about The Beatles’ song, “The Fool on the Hill”….

1: “It’s not about the fool on the hill.”

2: “Oh, but it is.”

1: “It’s not. It’s about the fools below, the fools beyond, who don’t want to listen, don’t want to see.”

2: “…and yet it’s the fool who listens, who sees, who speaks.”

1: “So?”

2: “So can’t it be about both…?”

The notion of “playing the fool” is not new. Indeed, it has deep folkloric (and, I would argue, rhetorical) roots, perhaps most typified in the figure of the trickster. Hermes—the deified messenger of the Greek gods—is an archetype of such a figure, but his heirs span the breadth of oratorical and literary histories, from the shape-shifter Loki, to the divine mediator of Yoruba Mythology Esu-Elegbara, to the mythos of the cunning fox, to the Shakespearian fool, and, certainly, to the fool on the hill. (Some have even cited Aang of Avatar as a most contemporary trickster.)

Yet far from perpetuating mere tricks, idle jokes or showy displays of wit, a trickster deliberately plays with social and political conventions in order to both expose and interpret a situation, to perform (i.e. rhetorically, dramaturgically, pictorially, etc.) while performing a critique, and thus to proffer alternative perspectives to what is otherwise provided. So while a fool might very well be one who lacks good judgment or sense, one who fools often times embodies what Mikhail Bakhtin dubs “intelligent deception,” a skill for the art (techne) of toying with “official” discourse in order to perturb the uncritical and challenge the norm. Consider, for example, William Hogarth’s piece, “Satire on False Perspective,” the epigraph of which alone (which reads: “Whoever makes design without the knowledge of perspective will be liable to such absurdities as are shewn [sic] in this frontispiece”) speaks to the importance of gaining, evaluating, and challenging particular perspectives.

As such, that which performs a rhetorical trick—be it oral, written, visual, etc.—might be said to “fool” by way of critique. The forms in which it appears are many: humor, comedy, irony, parody, satire, chiasmus, burlesque, punning, buffoonery, paraprosdokian, witticism, joke, lampoon, spoof, and the list could go on. However, as I see it, it is not necessarily a solely humorous enterprise. It also does not necessarily need to be foolish in order to fool the prevailing discourse, to perform a judgment. Though my point of entry is oftentimes humor, the critical enterprise is much in line with Kenneth Burke’s understanding of “comic criticism” within a “comic frame” amidst the drama of human relations. That is, it is observation inward as much as it is observation outward, admonitory as much as it is diagnostic, and hopefully charitable however hopelessly tragic is its vision. Comic critique can be comic, therefore, without being funny.

It is from this standpoint that I attempt to engage the play in politics as well as the politics in play. After all, if politics itself is indeed a “theater” as Mikhail Bakhtin, Harold Pinter, and others have suggested, it is as much a game to be played as it is a drama to be (en)acted. That it is no less serious stuff is likewise taken as a given. Nevertheless, as Oscar Wilde once quipped, “seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow,” and our own present state of democracy (along with humankind’s broader and current place in the world) is far too deep—that is profound, severe, rich, and yet also saturnine, almost unfathomable—to be without a comic praxis that is complemented by serious social and political action. I therefore see a productive act of fooling, a comic critique (funny or not), as serving a fundamentally (incoming double entendre) critical political function. What follows in this blog will seek to be an equally critical engagement with examples in like kind and an exercise of criticism itself with the end goal of widening frames of reference.

So with this, the first post, I welcome you to Fooling the Play and thank you in advance for your interest.

Image Credit: Appalachian State University, Psychology 3203: Perception, Spring 2010 Online Syllabus