the year of the jester

welcome to A Teetering Vulture! a newsletter about various science stuff as well as the life happenings of its author, Taylor.

I’ve spent most of February thinking about jesters. 

I’ve been reading a book about them, one written by historian and jester scholar (jester scholar!) Beatrice Otto. In Fools are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around the World, Beatrice succeeds in empirically proving the global ubiquity of jesters in the courts of history. Court jesters can be classified by their principal occupation: to keep people merry and to observe – and amplify – the ludicrous nature of any situation, and this jocular variety of human has in the past nearly always materialized in the households of royalty, from China to England to the Americas. Historically, they are figures who often ‘belong nowhere and are at ease everywhere,’ who are outcasts that nevertheless possess and enjoy great power – by virtue of charming wit and intellect, and proximity to the ears of powerful people. The jester lived to entertain and bring joy, and to ‘portray life as it truly is’ (or, to an extent, was). It is an archetype separate from that of the clown – who Beatrice describes as a character that often shows life as it should not be – life in an unsettling light – and from tricksters, who are often nefarious and amoral. 

At the beginning of the month I wrote a short story about two jesters. That’s what started this all. Naturally, it took a dose of fixation and stepping into the narrative shoes of something for me to begin to give it the slightest bit of attention. I wrote the story in the first place because I’ve been playing a video game called Balatro (the ancient Roman title for a professional jester), which is a rogue-like poker game where you can unlock one hundred and fifty different Joker cards, each depicting a different jester garbed in cap and bells, each with its own power that assists the player in winning a blind or an ante. My interest in the game spilled over into interest in art that people online were creating for the game, and the resulting overflow I channeled into writing a story that personified playing cards. 

Naturally. 

As I worked on it, I started to feel the metaphorical ground beneath my feet wobble slightly. While inhabiting the perspective of one of the jester characters I unexpectedly began to ask myself a question, one that is neither very profound nor unique but that all humans – us creatures who tend to be obsessed with and chronically bamboozled by a need to categorize, sort, and make sense of – ask themselves all the time: Can I… Can I relate to that? Is that thing… sort of like me? 

To answer my question, I began reading Beatrice’s book. Soon enough I had my answer. The instinct to pick up the book was maybe already answer enough – instinctively I was endeared to the type of characters I was writing, and perhaps the research was simply sating a mildly vain desire to consider myself in a different light, or imagine new fantastical facets to myself that were reflected in my fiction.

In the past, court jesters were often poets and musicians. Bards, versemakers; storytellers and entertainers. They wanted attention and they wanted people to watch and to listen to them – they wanted to make people laugh and smile and to influence the decisions they made. They were often fiercely independent and lived solidly outside the boundaries of societies’ norms while simultaneously being hyperaware of those societies’ machinations: they were, in the original sense of the word, queer. Of course I can relate to that to an extent. Despite being the introvert of all introverts, there’s a reason I write stories and stand at the front of classrooms. Despite spending my life largely baffled and intimidated by people, I still want their heads turned in my direction, and I want them to have fun because of me.

Though I would not, by any stretch of the word, label myself a jester – not even an aspiring one. I spend a lot of time engaged in a fandom dedicated to one contemporary relative of the court jester,*  and so I have spent considerable time observing and admiring the degree of power wielded and responsibility held by these people, the skill at foolishness and silliness required to successfully play such a role. I do enjoy having my attention trained on them, though. Having my attention trained on them means I spend a lot of time in the mindsets of people similar to me in the sense that we all want to keep other people entertained and we are all painfully aware of how ludicrous this world is. I am in a way more like Beatrice, though, who has spent her life so far as a scholar and writer of jesters’ stories. She has also spent quite a lot of time in a different role: as a leader in creating sustainable business networks in the UK and China. She wants to make the world a better, more beautiful and joy-filled place, not necessarily with the spotlights directly on her. I relate to that, too. 

Beatrice has also made the argument that the world could do with a court jester revival in our modern times, as, in history, the mere presence of a jester beside a monarch usually resulted in a 'widespread institutional check on power abuse, irrational exuberance, and insane levels of self-belief.' 

Like for many people, the beginning of 2025 for me has been tinged with despair and frustration. In many ways, things are not good. I feel very crushed by the circumstances of my life and the insane circumstances of the world. Being crushed isn’t going to paralyze me entirely, won’t make me cease trying to wriggle free and to do things that feel good and that do good (like write about jesters, for instance, but also teach and write fiction and experiment with a motley collection of other hobbies and such that I’ve been enthusiastically sinking time into) – but it sure does make doing everything a whole lot harder. Many of the powerful men in the world right now are like clowns; their conceptions of this world and life on this planet are grotesquely warped - and I despise them. What is going on in many places right now is life as it should not be. Life as a human on planet Earth should be a rich performance of kindness and care and attention. It should be filled with as many people trying to bring merriment to others as possible, with people who aren’t afraid to keep the most powerful of us in check, and with people to remind us that at its core, life is one big, huge joke – so we better not take some things too seriously. 

I’ll likely spend the rest of the month, if not more time, continuing to obsess over jesters. I’ve already unearthed the website that resulted from Fools are Everywhere, a global scholarly resource chock full of jester-related biographies and bibliographies: foolsareeverywhere.com. I’ve read several more papers on jesters, scoured Wikipedia, and of course continued to play Balatro. Who knows, maybe for me this will be the year of the jester. I do think I feel rather at home with my mind in jesterdom. And there’s no question I am a fool for many things.

*the highly respectable and revered modern artist known as the YouTuber