Welcome to Play Fool, a newsletter about the games we play and the games which play us. This is the third of three foundation pieces, where I try to lay out some of the key ideas animating this newsletter. The first two pieces, Foolishness and Mere Stupidity and Fools and Tricksters, aren’t required reading for this one, but you may find them helpful.
I want to add a few more comments today on foolishness, and to link it to the notion of play. I argued earlier1 that we could distinguish between a lack of intelligence (which we might call stupidity) and a lack of wisdom (which we might call foolishness). Of course, I don’t claim any linguistic authority over this division — Merriam-Webster seems equivocal about the idea.
I offer the distinction between stupid-as-unintelligent and fool-as-unwise because we generally think of intelligence as a relatively fixed, unchangeable endowment2. Wisdom, on the other hand, can be developed. Intelligence is given to us at birth, but wisdom accretes throughout life, nurtured by wise choices and wise action. We’ve all witnessed the sudden up-tick in wisdom that comes with becoming a parent or surviving some traumatic event. We all know an ‘old soul,’ or two, and we know them by their wisdom rather than their intelligence. We hear Yoda’s fractured English as a sign of profundity rather than stupidity.
Wisdom, unlike intelligence, is partially within our agency. Although we cannot adjust our wisdom with the ease with which we change the radio station, we can work with it and mould it, as a potter does with clay. This is why foolishness is such a vexing problem for us — we can never tell exactly where a fool’s agency begins and ends. In our less kind moments, we disdain the fool because we feel that they should be able to make better choices (“Why does she keep dating guys like him?” “Doesn’t he realise he’s doing this to himself?” “Why don’t they organise, rise up, and seize the means of production?”). In our kinder moments, disdain may be replaced with a keen sense of discomfort at others foolishness, as though we cannot quite determine if someone is acting habitually or with agency. Acts of foolishness seem simultaneously to be both choices and non-choices. The right thing to do seems obvious from the outside but non-obvious from the inside.
I am reminded of an improvised theatre exercise that a good friend, Jay, ran about a year or so ago. Players were asked to perform short scenes whereby one player would begin the scene with a heavy accusation directed at the other player (“You killed my guinea pig with a kitchen knife!”) and the other player would have to fully own that accusation by becoming the kind of person who would do that kind of horrible thing. The players in the room were all intermediate performers, so the exercise should have been fairly simple. However, players were fooled by it. They all struggled with the exercise in clear, systematic ways - like the tight-fisted monkey with its hand caught in a trap3.
Overwhelmingly, players were willing to make any choice except the one that was asked of them - owning the accusation by becoming the villain. Players would deflect the accusation with their own accusation (“Well you let it shit all over the kitchen counter!”) or they would explain their behaviour based on extenuating circumstances (“It was dying so I put it out of its misery!”). In both cases, the performer is trying to defend their (totally imaginary) reputation as good, worthwhile people by attributing their behaviour either to others or to circumstances.
Outside of the improvisation theatre, these are sensible strategies. We tend to make choices which protect our sense of self, especially when our sense of self is under acute threat. It’s like we have mental bodyguards for our own ego. In a polarised, culture like ours where virtue-signalling is social currency, it’s even harder to let our defenses drop and to own our inner villain. Honesty is a good way to get demoted, deported, dumped or deposed. This is why we enjoy Jim Carrey’s character in Liar Liar - When he farts in an elevator and declares “It was me!” he is owning his vulgarity in a way that we admire. There is a dark comedy that comes from honesty. We identify with the hero who says the things we are unwilling to, who discovers what is on the other side of the unspeakable.
In Jay’s improvisation exercise, a rare opportunity was offered to drop the fool-baggage of identity-protective cognition and to enjoy being the villain. However, even in the imaginary space of an improvisation scene, players struggled to make different choices (“Why can’t they do the exercise?” “Why does he defend himself, even when it’s made up?” “Why doesn’t she own her shit?”). It took a few tries and some coaching, but players slowly started to get the exercise. Some responses were middling, half-owning the accusation but half-explaining it away (“Yes, I killed your guinea pig. I was hungry and hadn’t had dinner.”). Over time, the foolishness started to drop away and players became able to embrace their inner villain (“Yes, I killed your guinea pig. I wanted dessert. I ate him with a glazed cherry stuffed up his arsehole!”).
The desire to appear good and virtuous is particularly pernicious and, like all strong and pernicious desires, can fool us in systematic ways. In the imaginary space of the improvisation scene, it prevented us from engaging with the exercise. Foolishness, then, can be a way of foreclosing options available to us. The monkey, through it’s greedy attachment, forecloses the option of letting go of the sweet food. Our performers, through their deep-seated desire to be good and virtuous, foreclosed the option of playing the villain. Foolishness, then, is a way of pre-emptively shutting out possibilities which are, in reality, open to us, and in many cases are where we find the greatest joy. This is why the improvisation guru, Del Close, instructed improvisers to “follow their fear.”
We can imagine play, particularly the kind of unstructured play that defines improvisation, as an infinitely complex series of branching paths — like a rabbit warren or soft, tangled ivy on a forest bed. Foolishness is a way of shoveling dirt down the warren, or trimming the ivy, in order to make our imagination conform to the familiar habit-patterns of our desires. So the person invited to play a villain instead plays a misunderstood hero, or the man invited to play a father ends up playing his father (I mean geez, you could play Father Christmas or the Pope!).
The fool, we can say, is the person who does not play. The fool is a person trapped by familiar, half-recognised desires and the habit-patterns they engender. They never find out what is on the other side of themselves. In improvisation, the consequences of this are trivial. In real life, the consequences are tragic. The “fool for love,” becomes destined to repeat the same relationship patterns over and over. This is tragic for the fool and the never-quite-loved lover, who begins the relationship as a whole person before slowly realising that they are stuck with a fool who can only see them as a fungible, replaceable person in an unacknowledged fantasy. The relationship lacks play: a self-soft, squishy experimentalism that allows the relationship to become something other than what it is instinctively perceived to be. Our foolishness can be deeply harmful to ourselves and others.
Recognising and overcoming foolishness, then, is a precondition for play. The players who were able to overcome their foolishness and play the villain had the most fun and drew the biggest laughs. They used the play-space of improvisation as an opportunity to explore the darkest peripheries of their mental warrens.
See Neuromythologies in Education (Geake, J., 2007)
I write about this parable at length in earlier posts. It is quoted in full in Fools and Tricksters.