Tag: Fools
It would have been way too predictable for me to try to fool you on April Fool’s Day, but this BBC video from 1957 was actually just such a joke, likely the first April Fool’s prank by a major broadcaster. I remember seeing it on the tv show, Tonight Starring Jack Parr, and since I still remember it, obviously it made an impression, either because I thought it very funny or perhaps because I actually fell for it at the time. I was eight, after all. I was reminded of it again when my old clown partner Fred Yockers sent me a clip of it. This is the original BBC version:
My October series honoring the 72nd birthday of the late, great “itinerant fool” Ken Feit included a post on his incredible travel journals, reproduced in the form of three PDFs. At the time I mentioned that I was still missing the holy grail letter, the one about his most ambitious trip, a seven-month, around-the-world journey that took him and San Francisco street juggler Ray Jason from the U.S. to England, Scotland, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Russia, Japan (via the trans-Siberian Express), Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Burma, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia (including Bali), China, Australia, New Zealand, and French Polynesia. Phew!
Never content to rest on his clown laurels, nor to just stick with well-paying movie gigs, Bill Irwin has consistently returned to the stage to star in ingenious pieces of his own creation or to take on challenging works by Beckett, Brecht, Moliere, Fo, Feydeau, and Shakespeare.
Here’s a riddle for you: what do the sticky floors of New York City subway cars and dusty, musty books on Elizabethan drama have in common? For the answer, just read on….
Fous et Bouffons: un Etude Physiologique, Psychologique et Historique (Fools & Buffoons: A Physiological, Psychological, and Historical Study)
by Dr. Paul Moreau
It turns out Erasmus is not just the name of a high school in New York City. Apparently before he was a high school — about 500 years before — he was also a famous philosopher.
The standard entry on fools and jesters usually makes mention of Shakespeare’s jester characters, especially the fool in King Lear. It was Robert Armin (c. 1563 – 1615) who first acted the role as a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, as well as such similar roles as Touchstone in As You Like It, Feste in Twelfth Night, Lavatch in All’s Well That Ends Well, and perhaps Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, as well as comic parts in other Elizabethan dramas. In fact, Armin’s joining the company around 1600 is credited by some with Shakespeare’s increased interest in witty jesters.
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Workshops & Other Events
My first book (1976)
My book Clowns has long been out of print, but you can borrow it for two weeks at a time from the Internet Archive. More information is available here.
My second book (2015)
Visual and verbal humor for the cognitively and artistically curious! Available here.
“A book to treasure!”
—Bill Irwin