Clowning Is a Longtime Tradition

Gene Seymour makes an important point by locating Jim Carrey in the tradition of classic Hollywood clowns (“Silliness Is No Joke,” Calendar, Jan. 20). But the ancestry of America’s current King of Komedy is even older than Seymour suggests. Carrey’s brand of idiocy was a staple of humor way before the movies--or even vaudeville and burlesque--were invented. Boomers like me were first exposed to it in the form of certain jokes, which were already antique by the time we heard them in kindergarten. Here are two of them:

Question: Why did the idiot run around his house all night?

Answer: He was trying to catch a little sleep.

Question: Why did the idiot throw the alarm clock out the window?

Answer: He wanted to see time fly.

Admittedly, these are not exactly knee-slappers. Still, they were pretty amusing to a 6-year-old back in 1954, and not just because they involved a bit of rudimentary word play. It was the absurd behavior of the idiot--a person so astonishingly stupid that he took every expression literally--that made them comical.

Of course, it’s not very nice to laugh at mental deficiency. In fact, making fun of morons is exceptionally cruel. But it’s a form of cruelty that is not only common to childhood but is shared by human beings all over the world. For as I would later discover, “Idiot Jokes” are actually part of a widespread and ancient folklore tradition.

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Throughout the world, in all times and places, a significant number of folk tales have dealt with the comical doings of dimwits, buffoons and imbeciles. Folklorists call these anecdotes numskull stories.

The mindless hero of the typical numskull story is capable of the most ridiculous deeds. There is, for example, the numskull who sows his field with slices of cheese to grow a crop of dairy cows. There is the tale of the simpleton who carries a ladder to the saloon because he has heard that “the drinks are on the house.” There are stories of bungling fools and gullible fools, fools who try climbing up flashlight beams, and fools so abysmally stupid that they cannot locate their own legs in the dark. And on and on.

Why human beings should find the numskull so entertaining is a mystery that has stymied even the most learned of scholars. Stith Thompson, one of the world’s leading folklorists, expresses some astonishment at the “surprisingly large number” of these tales and adds: “Every generation has its new supply of such stories.”

For the current generation of moviegoers, the perennial appetite for numskull stories is now being fed by a pair of brainless buddies who drive around in a fur-covered pooch-mobile, have difficulty operating such complicated mechanisms as breath-spray and think that Austria is the country of Crocodile Dundee. I am referring, of course, to the heroes of the mega-hit movie “Dumb and Dumber.”

The popularity of these cinematic nitwits has provoked a growing outcry from moralists, who deplore the movie as a symptom of everything from the “dumbing of America” to the decline of Western civilization. Placing these characters in the appropriate context, however, makes it clear that they are simply contemporary versions of a figure that has delighted people throughout the ages. Ultimately, their popularity tells us less about the present state of American culture than about the unchanging needs of the human imagination.

Far from being harmful or degrading, stories about the numskull or fool seem to be vital to the emotional well-being of every society. With his bumbling disregard for decorum and propriety, the fool permits the audience a vicarious release of their own impolite fantasies and antisocial energies. The coarse, even obscene antics of the fool have been celebrated in countless performances throughout the world, from the Feast of Fools of medieval Europe to the rituals of Native American clown societies. Hollywood entertainment, of course, has always been full of such figures, from literal dummies like Mortimer Snerd to blockheads like Walt Disney’s Goofy, Steve Martin’s “The Jerk” and every Jerry Lewis character.

It may be painful to acknowledge but--like another pair of modern-day numskulls, Beavis and Butt-head--the moronic heroes of “Dumb and Dumber” spring from psychic sources common to us all. Crude, rude and witless, they are nevertheless possessed of a weirdly compelling power that is characteristic of folklore images. Beneath their contemporary trappings, they are figures out of the primordial past, archetypes in goofball clothing, part of the dramatis personae of our collective dream life.

Oh, yes. And one more thing. They are really, really funny.