Who was the last Jester? That was the question I had in mind when I saw this pop in related questions people of the internet had on the subject of Jesterdom. And I was of course quite amused by this.
This answer was taken from an excerpt from Fools Are Everywhere, The Court Jester Around the World by Beatrice K. Otto. And as I continued reading, I found this insight into the constitution of the Jester archetype below to be particularly moving particularly in a society with populations at either end of the current political/ideological spectrum who romanticize revolution without fully grasping the horrors involved as for what that actually entails during and after.
"The jester is in a sense on the side of the ruler. The relationship was often very close and amiable, and the jester was almost invariably a cherished rather than a tolerated presence. This leads to the kindliness of jesters: they could be biting in their attacks, but there is usually an undercurrent of good-heartedness and understanding to their words. If they talk the king out of slicing up some innocent, it is not only to save him from the king's wrath but also to save the king from himself—they can be the only ones who will tell him he suffers from moral halitosis.
The jester is also perceived as being on the side of the people, the little man fighting oppression by the powerful. By fooling wisely ("en folastrant sagement"), the jester often won favor among the people ("gaigna de grace parmy le peuple"). In the folk perception of southern India a king was hardly considered a king without his jester, and the continuing appeal of the court jester in India, in stories and comic books, is perhaps equaled only in Europe.
He may have disappeared from the courts and corridors of power, but he still has a powerful hold on the collective imagination. Yet he is no rebel or revolutionary.
His detached stance allows him to take the side of the victim in order to curb the excesses of the system without ever trying to overthrow it—his purpose is not to replace one system with another, but to free us from the fetters of all systems:
Under the dissolvent influence of his personality the iron network of physical, social and moral law, which enmeshes us from the cradle to the grave, seems—for the moment—negligible as a web of gossamer.
The Fool does not lead a revolt against the Law, he lures us into a region of the spirit where, as Lamb would put it, the writ does not run."
