Playing the fool [electronic resource] : subversive laughter in troubled times / Ralph Lerner.

9780226473178 (electronic bk.)
9780226473154
0226473155

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, c2009.

English

1 online resource (ix, 134 p.)

PN6149.P64 L47 2009eb

809.7/93581

The role of the fool is to provoke the powerful to question their convictions, preferably while avoiding a beating. Fools accomplish this not by hectoring their audience, but by broaching sensitive topics indirectly, often disguising their message in a joke or a tale. Writers and thinkers throughout history have adopted the fool's approach, and here Ralph Lerner turns to six of them--Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, Pierre Bayle, Benjamin Franklin, and Edward Gibbon--to elucidate the strategies these men employed to persuade the heedless, the zealous, and the overly confident to pause.

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Includes bibliographical references and index.

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