Where are the fools? In Beatrice Otto's fine documentation, the jester has been an important accompaniment to power in the world's courts, having been granted the exceptional privilege of ‘telling the truth’. Yet many jesters were fiercely loyal to the eminent objects of their foolish ridicule. Today's organizations, despite various external perspectives ranging from independent governance boards to outside auditors and consultants, seem to be in increasing need of such courageous and caring interventions. Insufficient reflexivity (Alvesson & Spicer, Reference Alvesson and Spicer2012), imitative rather than economically rational (DiMaggio & Powell, Reference DiMaggio and Powell1983), managed by dominant logic (Bettis & Prahalad, Reference Bettis and Prahalad1995), prone to path-dependent or escalating commitments (Hsieh, Tsai, & Chen, Reference Hsieh, Tsai and Chen2014; Schreyögg & Sydow, Reference Schreyögg and Sydow2011), fearful (Vuori & Huy, forthcoming), and missing the foolishness that would combat such closed tendencies (March, Reference March, March and Olsen1976, Reference March2006), organizations appear to lack insider-jesters who know the skeletons in the cupboard rather than being removed from them. Such speaking out should make organizations more innovative and eventually strategically resilient (Välikangas & Sevon, Reference Välikangas and Sévon2010). Besides, it would help escape the boredom of much organizational life while improving morale in organizations that do not walk the talk. Otto helpfully provides a job announcement ready for use. The Dialogue, Debate, and Discussion column is looking for jesters to add more fooling to organizational theorizing.
Illustration: Hand-coloured The Fool's Cap World Map – copyright Beatrice Otto – original (ca. 1590) in the Bodleian Library (Bodleian Douce Portfolio 142 [92]).
INTRODUCTION
Jester Meng in the Kingdom of Chu was originally a musician. He was six feet tall with a fund of witty repartee at his disposal and was always offering his ruler useful advice in the guise of a good joke.
Sima Qian (145-c.86 BC), ‘Biography of Jester Meng’, Shiji
This paper draws on five years’ research into the role of the fool or jester in a wide variety of courts and court-like power hubs worldwide, with primary and secondary sources in ten languages (dead or alive), comprising arguably the most comprehensive bibliography in its field (Otto, Reference Otto2001, Reference Otto2007). It aims to highlight the valuable and vital candour of the court fool across diverse cultures while emphasizing at least a few of the main non-Western manifestations. It also posits the continuing need for this robust nonsense-buster in contemporary organizations and suggests some research avenues that merit exploration.Footnote [1]
By following the jester wherever he (or sometimes she) led me, I got a glimpse of a more intimate and informal aspect of many courts across history. Strong and enduring traditions of jesterdom were found in major and smaller civilizations, not least some of those now more readily referred to as ‘key emerging markets’, such as Turkey, India, and China. My research included sifting hundreds of classical Chinese accounts of fools over some 2000 years, many of which had never previously been translated let alone mentioned in the (mostly Western) scholarly literature on court jesters. In India, there is still a strong recognition of the role, encapsulated in the wisdom and wit of superstar jesters such as Birbal, Tenali Rama, and Gopal, whose besting of rulers and other VIPs is widely known and regularly recycled in cartoons.
Many of us have a favourite Dilbert cartoon, which we might have passed around among colleagues, sharing a wry chuckle over the perceived inanities of organizational life or the imbecilities of its management. My favourite has Dilbert's boss ask him to run a model on what would happen if the company lost half its staff to a global pandemic. Without blinking, Dilbert asks if he should model for the productive half or the half who tell people to run models on losing half your staff to a global pandemic.
Sometimes these cartoons surface in a presentation, selected to make a point, break the ice, or align people. Dilbert's power lies in his pithy playback of feeling powerless while working for an organization which is run suboptimally (a long but polite term for ‘badly’). Dilbert is common sense in a cubicle; the organization, the management, the system are all dumb, but ‘they’ have the power to fire Dilbert (and the rest of us). So we lie low at our desks, eat our vac-packed sarnies, and carry on typing. Dilbert and the cartoon medium that delivers him have become an outlet for the expression of what people really feel, perhaps partly due to the absence of an outlet in the form of organizational jesters.
Millennia before Dilbert, courts (here meaning regal not legal) revolved around very important persons indeed, be it dukes, princes, kings, emperors, and their female equivalents (occasionally), or popes and cardinals, minus female equivalents. They often came with bucketloads of the things that can drive wrecking balls through the heart and effectiveness of any organization: colossus egos and humility deficit, chessboard politics and positioning, group-think lemmingness, and the bane of collective existence, greed and corruption.
To compound this hit list of systemic weaknesses, in many cases they lacked the checks and balances that a modern organization such as a company might have, including independent regulators, investigative journalists, third party verification, and regular performance evaluation by customers or markets. Those at the pinnacle of power were often the principal regulators with life and death authority over underlings (which thankfully Dilbert's boss lacks), with performance evaluation perhaps appearing once in a while in the form of a cheering or jeering mob of ‘stake holders’ ready to charge the ramparts.
FOOLS THEN…
And, let me tell you, fools have another gift which is not to be despised. They're the only ones who speak frankly and tell the truth, and what is more praiseworthy than truth?
Erasmus, Praise of Folly (1515)
Set against what could look to a 21st century CEO like a carte blanche of power often enjoyed by the head honchos of a court, five years’ trawling through hundreds of accounts made clear that there was a widespread institutional check on power abuse, irrational exuberance, and insane levels of self-belief in the form of the court jester or fool. This role was universal in appearing apparently spontaneously in diverse cultures and in being understood and chronicled in strikingly similar terms, regardless of the era or region.
They would crack jokes about current affairs in order to offer indirect advice.
Mao Qiling (1623-1716) and others, Shengchao tongshi shi
This often informal and even low-status position could contribute to the durability of the court and its CEO-equivalents. As the half life of companies gets shorter, the need to be adaptable and innovative increases, and the requirements for transparency greater, I propose that the contribution of court jesters to the success of modern organizations be encouraged by allowing at least one person unfettered licence to hold the organization accountable to its alleged mission and principles, thereby:
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• Reinforcing communication between top management and employees to help senior executives keep in touch with the reality ‘on the street’ and among those who work (or vote) for them
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• Unleashing a loyal but fiercely independent perspective – jesters did not attempt to overthrow the king, rather giving him a chance to do a better job by providing refreshingly impartial advice and unexpected insight
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• Exposing political or unethical shenanigans before they risk threatening the health, reputation, or even survival of the organization – Enron might not have gone as far down the road to dissolution if it had a few truth-blurting, wise-cracking fools who could not be silenced
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• Shaking up the organization's thinking to foster more innovation – if you asked a jester to ‘think outside the box’, he would probably ask ‘what box?’; by their nature they tend to be outside mental and organizational boxes and as the Chinese saying has it, ‘the spectator sees clearly’ (pang guan zhe qing), with one Chinese jester being called Adding Clarity Li (Li Jiaming)
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• Relieving stress and tension making the organization arguably happier and more productive
Illustration: Mayan pottery urn, ca. 6th century. Sketched by Robert Lenkewicz from a photo in Erica Tietze-Conrat, Dwarfs & Jesters in Art, trans. E. Osborn (New York: Phaidon, 1957), p. 10 and 86.
At this point, Westerners frequently ask: ‘But were they really like King Lear's fool? Could they actually tell the truth’? Shakespeare's creation is the archetype made manifest, at least in the Western mind, and it has always amazed me how subtle and sophisticated is the understanding of the jester's role when it is rarely explicitly studied; people just somehow get it. And yes, they could and did actually tell the truth, and it is this more than any other factor that distinguishes them from armies of entertainers and witty hangers-on that the court, with its ready supply of meals and favours, could attract. The Aztec king Montezuma II (1466–1520) was observed by Spanish visitors to keep fools and to value their candour:
He frequently heard music, during the time of his meal, and was entertained with the humorous sayings of some deformed men whom he kept out of mere state. He showed much satisfaction in hearing them, and observed that among their jests, they frequently pronounced some important truth. (Clavigero, 1789/Reference Clavigero1979: 212)
Jesters and dwarfs were the lowest of the Zhou dynasty entertainers, but by jests and indirect advice, even they could prod their governments to reform.
Hong Mai (1123–1202), Yijian Zhi (1166), part 2, fol. 4
So if you think of the jester as a Western concept, think again. The fool as a universal player blazed into my consciousness the day I discovered the engaging biographies of Chinese court jesters by China's Herodotus, Sima Qian (145-c. 86 BC). Flourishing over 1500 years before Shakespeare encoded Lear's fool in our cultural DNA, they did everything a Western education told me a court jester did. The same role, the same licence to speak out when the emperor was getting above his mandate or losing touch with reality. The same clever and occasionally knife-edge deployment of humour to help the emperor grasp that slipping reality, and to damn well act more wisely or humanely. The same pin-prick of wit to puncture waffle and nonsense by quackish monks and so-called scholars.
Illustration: Dongfang Shuo Steals a Peach, in Chuan Xihua ed., Zhongguo gudian wenxue banhua xuanji (Shanghai: Renmin Meishu Chubanshe, 1981), 2: 270.
Though Shuo was given to jests and buffoonery, he would on occasion observe the emperor's mood and, if he found it right, would speak out boldly in severe reprimand. The emperor always listened to what he had to say.
Ban Gu (c. 32–92), ‘Biography of Dongfang Shuo’,
History of the Han (Hanshu)
China had a magnificent tradition, chronicled over a couple of thousand years in dynastic and other histories, miscellanies and classical works of musicology, among other primary sources. Sima Qian's biographies are the cultural anchorage that a Chinese person typically uses in understanding the role of the court jester. Having the father of Chinese history feature these majesty-mockers in his Historical Records (Shiji) made it respectable to write about jesters in serious literary or historical writing for the next two millennia.Footnote [2]
In classical Chinese there is a term for the bold remonstrance a loyal official would offer if he felt the emperor was going astray: jian, with such a ‘remonstrating official’ being a jianguan. A related term, fengjian, implies indirect, mocking or satirical advice, with a variant being youjian, or ‘jester's remonstrance’. Some Chinese jesters had names that echoed this: in addition to Adding Clarity Li, there was Immortal Revelation Ding (Ding Xianxian), Subtle Reformer King (Wang Ganhua) and, reflecting a common metaphor of fools holding up a mirror to give us a really good look at ourselves, Newly Polished Mirror (Jing Xinmo) and Mirrorlike Lu (Lu Ruojing).
Illustration: Painted earthenware figurine (Eastern Han Dynasty, 25-220), excavated in Xindu County, Sichuan; sketched by Christine Otto from Susan Caroselli, ed., The Quest for Eternity: Chinese Ceramic Sculptures from the People's Republic of China (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987).
Sima Qian's jesters were individuals with ready access and often a close and even affectionate relationship with the king or emperor, which is also a standard pattern for jesters in other parts of the world. Like jesters elsewhere, they could have a musical element, and musicians and poets have frequently been a source of court fools and jesterish honesty. They also benefited from gifts and favours, with a common reward for wit and candour apparently being, in the Chinese case, bolts and rolls of silk. Chinese jesters also pooled resources and came up with impromptu skits to get a point across to the emperor, and arguably these skits were the prototypes of Chinese drama: ‘Every time he put on a skit before the emperor, he would try to correct contemporary matters with his counsel’ (Zhu Yu, 1119).
Some of these feisty fools dealt with rulers of absolute power and sometimes questionable balance, yet their ‘jester's remonstrances’ managed to change behaviour, relieve suffering and reduce the tax burden (surely that alone justifies reintroducing them …). The Emperor Liezu (r. 961–76) expressed concern that rain was not falling within the city, only around it, suggesting that the will of heaven may have been contravened. Gradually Stretching Taller chipped in with ‘The rain is terrified of being taxed, so it daren't enter the city’, at which the Emperor ‘laughed heartily and gave orders to get rid of all excessive taxes’.Footnote [3] Later, it should be mentioned, the jester caperingly intervened to save Liezu's life, grabbing what he knew to be a poisoned cup and draining it before the Emperor lifted it to his lips, dying soon after.Footnote [4]
Now the hunchback, whom all this bother was about, was the Sultan's jester, and the King could not abide him out of his sight for an hour.
The Book of the Thousand and One Night
When the Emperor Xuanzong (r. 712–56) commented on the tinkling of some bells sounding like a voice, his jester made an onomatopoeic pun, combining the Emperor's name with ‘sloppy’ or ‘dissolute’, to tell Xuanzong he had not been running the country as he ought: ‘They sound like someone saying “san lang lang dang, sang lang lang dang”’. Xuanzong laughed and felt ashamed.Footnote [5] The jester In Full Streamer (Huang Fanchuo) also stunned Xuanzong by his capacity to guess his mood by the way he played a musical instrument.Footnote [6] With a jester like this at your side, who needs a therapist?
AND NOW?
Jester Twisty Pole was an entertainer in Qin, a dwarf and a first-class funster, but behind his every joke was a grasp of universal principles.
Sima Qian, ‘Biography of Jester Twisty Pole’, Shiji
A common and intriguing question is whether there is still a role for court fools, and if so, who has taken it on. Political cartoonists are a good stand-in, though they lack the direct link to and influence over the people or organizations they criticize. But the levity of the cartoon medium can drive home a strong message with breath-taking immediacy, power and poignancy and, like a good joke, you get the message – or the message gets you - before you have time to put up defences. Witness some of the pre-war cartoonists who were sounding alarm bells about Hitler as early as 1936, joining Churchill in reading the Nazi writing on the wall.
But within an organization, functioning like a jester in a court? The best known and possibly only formal ‘corporate jester’ was Paul Birch who had free run of BA for a while in the 1990s, before being fired by the next CEO. This was an unusually short-lived tenure; although some jesters were kicked out of court, historically they tended to be long-running performers, even outliving the boss and being adopted by the next generation. But Birch was clear about the role: ‘People will always focus on the humour element that's inherent in the concept of the Jester; no matter how many times you explain that the main role of the Jester is to challenge. The humour is just the tool’.Footnote [7]
There are examples of professional clowns or comedians having acted as quasi-court jesters. The American circus clown Dan Rice (1823–1901) is said to have been an unofficial jester to President Lincoln and the comedian Will Rogers (1879–1935) had ready access to Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt, and was known for his mockery of congressmen. Roosevelt commented on his acuity: ‘While I had discussed European matters with many others … both Americans and Foreign, Will Rogers’ analysis proved to be more accurate than any other I had heard’.Footnote [8]
One who looks to people's pleasure … is ready-witted in disclosures made through Pleasantry, or in Covert pleasure and is clever, and can give censure through his words, is to be known as a Jester.
The Natyasastra (c. 200 BC)
Informally, many people see themselves as a court jester in their organizations, although whether they use humour to genuinely challenge and call to account, or just to lighten things up, is unclear. But in a world awash with management systems, consultants, non-executive directors and other forms of intervention aimed at ensuring sound decision making, is there a need for someone who uses humour to tell the truth when others don't dare?
This question was recently answered for me by someone at a technology company which for several years had dominated its market, before plunging from stellar to cellar. A comment struck me: for some time, senior management knew that sales were tumbling, but nobody could say so. Let's take that on board: they knew, but nobody could say. How many organizations lose critical time to fix things that are broke simply because nobody can say so? As FIFA heads begin to roll faster than a football on an unlevel playing field, one question that may be asked is who knew but couldn't or wouldn't say? Could an outspoken fool with a licence to mock-and-tell have seen and said long before the organization was brought into disrepute?
Maybe, but humour, like love, although a potent humanizer and honesty-broker, cannot conquer all. That ‘licence’ is the fertile ground it needs to bear fruit; without it, humour, like love, can be manipulated for selfish ends. I have seen humour used to create an appearance of a management team in what is but a random assemblage of individuals, with jokes simply papering over the cracks of the ‘team’ dysfunction. Or organizations using fake humour to force an alienated workforce to be – or act – happy, happy, happy, denying themselves its true worth as a healthy lie-detector and truth-teller, and a humane way to deliver criticism and develop or air alternative views. Humour can also be abused for stroking stoked-up egos, shoring up rather than challenging their sense of infallibility, and many of us have witnessed this form of sycophancy with everyone chortling heartily at feeble jokes.
Now, though laughter may be regarded as a trivial matter, and an emotion frequently awakened by buffoons, actors or fools, it has a certain imperious force of its own which it is very hard to resist … it frequently turns the scale in matters of great importance.
Quintilian (c. 35-100)
However, used for benign ends humour can be an effective shaker-upper, allowing people to acknowledge stupidity without intolerable loss of face, and to then change course. Among other techniques, fools used absurdity to expose absurdity – taking a hair-brained idea to its logical conclusion while giving it their full foolish backing, until the ruler decided to ditch the plan after all. When Er Shi (r. 209–207 BC), emperor of the Qin, had the bright idea to lacquer the Great Wall, Jester Twisty Pole got him to change his mind:
‘That's a splendid idea’, said Jester Twisty Pole. ‘If you hadn't mentioned it, Your Majesty, I'd certainly have suggested it myself…Lacquer the Great Wall all smooth and shiny, then it'll be too slippery for any invaders to climb over. Now, let's get down to the practical side of the job. The lacquering's easy enough, but building the drying room may present a problem or two’. The second emperor burst out laughing and shelved the project.Footnote [9]
A boss can have a big ego and even a mild touch of insanity, as long as somewhere there is a sane little voice telling him he needs some honesty, even if he outsources it to the fool of no apparent consequence. King Lear ‘loses it’ in every sense, but he hangs on to the bitter medicine of his fool's honesty, and when the fool wishes he knew how to lie to save himself from thrashings by Lear's daughters, Lear threatens to whip him if he stops telling the truth:
I marvel what kin thou and thy daughters are:
they'll have me whipp'd for speaking true, thou'lt
have me whipp'd for lying; and sometimes I am
whipp'd for holding my peace. (King Lear, 1.4.175–81)
So is Dilbert a court jester? He tells the truth and points out folly, he is funny and fearless, he is of lowly status unthreatening to the power structures above. But no, I would not view him as a jester simply because he seems to see the power he criticizes in terms of ‘them’, if not the enemy outright. He also apparently lacks any intention (or hope) of changing ‘them’, rather raising a laugh among ‘us’ at the expense of the idiot managers who are beyond the reach of reason. Dilbert may help us come to terms with our own powerlessness in parallel situations, making us feel less isolated in our cubicles, but he does not appear to help ‘them’ run their court, corporation or country any better.
Organizations sometimes bring in an outside perspective in the form of consultants, and some might argue that they have a fool's role in being able to say what no insider can get away with, while also being useful scapegoats if things go pear-shaped. The strength of the jester, however, is that he is an outsider on the inside, somehow combining an independent stance with a profound knowledge of the organization and its management, and probably at lower cost than consultancy fees.Footnote [10]
A sense of humour, after all, is only a sense of proportion and would go a long way to solving the world's troubles.
Donald Hall, Romanian Furrow (London: Bene Factum, 2007), p. 97
Some years ago there was a full-page advertisement in the highly respectable Swiss newspaper, Die Neue Zürcher Zeitung, inviting applications for the role of court fool to the Swiss parliament, ‘to stand between the people and the politicians and between various political camps, so that politics will become more tolerable’. There was a form to fill in and cut out, and a free-phone number to call.Footnote [11] Over millennia and in many parts of the world, people at the power peak have found great value in having at least one person of robust independence and an irrepressibly humorous bent, cavorting at the centre of the organization, subjecting it to the fool's bracing, puncturing wit and incisiveness.
But where are they now? Does the Chinese Communist party have jesters in its committees and enclaves? How many CEOs have a fearless fool at their elbow on their way to the board meeting, perhaps driving the limo that is taking them there? Or are contemporary court jesters out there in the blogosphere, or tweeting for truth? I don't think we know, and that may be partly the nature (and strength) of the fool.
Starting with social media, I would suggest that bloggers and tweeters, even humorous power-prodders, are more like cartoonists and comedians – they have a role (and a valuable one) as a generalized societal jester which those in power may or may not notice let alone act on. But I am not sure this is a clear cut equivalent of the historical court fool, whose influence came from the direct access, closeness and trust they enjoyed in their interactions with the ruling elite. Tweeters and bloggers, comedians and cartoonists may have an indirect influence on behaviour, if only by getting enough voters or customers sufficiently upset to get you tipped out of public or C-suite office, or your products boycotted, but they are less likely to have that hotline to power on a day to day basis.
If there are court jesters in the sense outlined here, I would expect that they operate below the radar in personal contact with power. As such, they are not obviously visible from the outside, and they might lose their licence to speak up if they broadcast what they were saying. To determine if the jester in this direct one-to-one sense still exists, research would be needed into the informal dynamics of organizations. So here's a light-hearted but serious suggestion for a research project to explore if they still operate on anything like the scale of the past, and if so, how and where, and what can be done to help them keep (or make) organizations effective, honest and transparent:
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• Approach an array of important organizations from government and business – a mix of strategic ministries (economics, education and defense would do), a political party or two, the top 2–3 companies in a country and a couple of significant international or intergovernmental entities, e.g., the UN Security Council, the International Monetary Fund and the World Economic Forum. And FIFA.
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• Repeat the process across several regions, or simply start with those that have had a notable court fool tradition, e.g. China, India, Turkey, Mexico, UK, France and Italy.
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• Approach the top dog in each of your chosen entities, noting that ‘top’ refers to manifest power through influence, wealth, titles, or number of people they can fire or who have voted for them through the market or the ballot box.
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• Ask them privately (you probably need to guarantee anonymity), if they have anyone in their entourage who uses humour to keep them in touch with reality and to challenge them, or if they feel a need for such.
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• Put out a call to self-identified organizational jesters, asking them to explain a) why they think they qualify and b) what they have to show for it. Again, you will probably need to give assurances of anonymity.
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• Compare what the self-proclaimed jesters and the jester-patrons say, and see if there is a modern model we can extract to apply in organizations today.
If you think the jokey tone of this means it cannot be serious, you may have missed the point of jestering and might like to consider reading this paper again. Strip away the levity, sharpen up the methodology (greatly) and you may have a real research project. And if any important people you know would like to appoint their own court fool to cut through politics and engender more openness and clarity, a template job description is outlined below.
Illustration: Stone rubbing of a Chinese juggler – from a paper copy (no attribution).
In sum, I don't know if contemporary leaders in emerging markets have jesters, but I would bet that many of them, at least in China, India, and Turkey, are entirely familiar with some great jesters of their past, and are able to name them and the ways they challenged rulers to behave more wisely and justly. Ask the next Chinese, Indian, or Turkish leader you meet about their favourite Jing Xinmo, Birbal, or Nasruddin story and see where your conversation goes.
I have often heard it said in a vulgar proverb, the wise may be instructed by a fool. Seeing the answers and responses of sage and judicious men have in no manner of way satisfied you, take advice of some fool, and possibly by so doing you may come to get that counsel which will be agreeable to your own heart's desire and contentment. You know how by the advice and counsel and prediction of fools, many kings, princes, states, and commonwealths have been preserved, several battles gained, and divers doubts of a most perplexed intricacy resolved. (Rabelais, Reference Rabelais1933: 130)
