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Culture, Essays, History, Literature, Politics

WHO’S FOOL NOW?

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On a banished jester, a cartoonist’s pun, and who has held the fool’s license since kings stopped keeping fools

In 1638 the king’s fool mocked an archbishop and was banished the same day. Since then the fool’s license has passed from hand to hand: to a party and a censor, a cabinet minister’s lunch, a newspaper’s owner.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 30, 2026

Early in 1638, with Scotland in uproar over a new prayer book that Archbishop William Laud had championed, the king’s jester greeted the archbishop with a question. “Who’s fool now? Does not your Grace hear the news from Stirling about the liturgy?”

Laud took the matter to the Privy Council. The same day, Archibald Armstrong, who had served James and then Charles, was sentenced “to have his coat pulled over his head and be discharged the king’s service and banished the king’s court.”

The sentence tells you what a jester’s freedom was. It wasn’t his. The king extended it, and it covered almost anything that amused the king. It didn’t cover an archbishop’s dignity in a season when the king’s church was being defied, and one complaint was enough to withdraw it in an afternoon. The coat pulled over his head was the fool’s motley taken back, as if the office had only ever been lent to him.

The king’s fool disappeared from the English court. The mocking didn’t stop. It moved into prints and plays, newspapers and cartoons, and at every stage someone else decided what the mockery would cost. That someone was sometimes a party, sometimes a censor, once a cabinet minister over lunch, and lately the owner of the page. The penalties have softened, and that isn’t a small thing. But the question Armstrong asked Laud has a second meaning he didn’t intend. Whoever mocks the powerful has to ask who allows it, and whether it has ever been the fool’s to keep.

I

The Charter

Shakespeare wrote down the terms of the fool’s license more exactly than any statute did. In As You Like It the melancholy Jaques, who longs for a motley coat of his own, asks for the one thing the coat conferred: “I must have liberty / Withal, as large a charter as the wind, / To blow on whom I please; for so fools have.” A charter is a grant. The wind blows where it likes. A fool blows where he has been allowed to. In Twelfth Night Olivia states the terms from the other side, defending her jester against a steward who wants him silenced: “There is no slander in an allowed fool, though he do nothing but rail.” And Lear’s Fool knows how narrow the grant can be. “They’ll have me whipped for speaking true, thou’lt have me whipped for lying, and sometimes I am whipped for holding my peace.”

The parts were written in the years Robert Armin was the company’s clown, and he is generally credited with playing all three. He had also published a book about real fools, some of whom he knew. They were written, too, in the years after England had been reminded who licensed mockery. On June 1, 1599, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London ordered “that noe Satyres or Epigramms be printed hereafter.” Within days the offending books were burned at Stationers’ Hall.

Armstrong lived inside those terms for decades. By 1623 he was well enough known to ride to Madrid with Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham, who had gone to win the prince a Spanish bride, and he was made much of at the Spanish court. The story is told, and it has the polish of a jest-book, that when Buckingham threatened to have him hanged, Armstrong answered that dukes had often been hanged for insolence, but never fools for talking. Whether or not he said it, it is the charter as a fool would have understood it.

The charter had a limit all the same, and an archbishop found it. The historian Andrea Shannon argues that Armstrong was never simply a clown who slipped once. Across two reigns he had a reputation for pointed comment on affairs of state, and the Spanish journey made him a public figure beyond the court. His fall, she writes, shows “the fluid boundaries of acceptable criticism” at a time when state affairs were increasingly discussed outside the court. What changed in 1638 wasn’t the fool. It was his subject. A joke at an archbishop’s expense was the king’s amusement. A joke about the king’s church in open defiance was a comment on the king’s policy, made at the one moment the court couldn’t afford to laugh.

It would be easy to make Armstrong the first chapter of a story of progress, and the story wouldn’t be wholly false. Armstrong had one patron, who gave him both the license and the living. When the license went, so did the coat, the post and the court. No one who comes after him here depended on a single man for all of that. A licensor you can walk away from is a different thing from one you can’t, and later fools would learn to walk.

II

The Pension and the Censor

Parties took up the habit kings had dropped. In 1797 George Canning, a rising man in Pitt’s government, founded The Anti-Jacobin to ridicule the government’s opponents, and the caricaturist James Gillray took a pension of £200 a year. Canning paid for plates on the paper’s themes, and some count twenty that came of the arrangement. The university library that now holds Gillray’s prints describes what the money bought as “a temporary loyalty.”

Feste would have understood the arrangement. All through Twelfth Night he turns his wit into coins. When Viola pays him for a jest, he looks at the money and asks, “Would not a pair of these have bred, sir?” A pensioned fool isn’t silenced. He is aimed. Whether Gillray ever turned his needle on Pitt or Canning while the money came is a question the surviving accounts of the arrangement don’t answer. What they do show is the new shape of the license. It was no longer a coat that could be pulled over a man’s head. It was an income that could stop.

The other license belonged to the state, and it reached a fool three centuries dead. On November 22, 1832, Paris saw the first performance of Victor Hugo’s Le roi s’amuse, a play about Triboulet, the real jester of Francis I, who serves a libertine king. The next day the government banned it for its supposed insults to the reigning king, Louis-Philippe. Hugo went to court to have it restored. In the preface to the printed play he called the ban not merely “a monstrous act of censorship and arbitrary power” but “a true confiscation.” He lost, and paid the costs. The play wasn’t performed again for fifty years.

Nineteen years later Verdi set the same story. The Austrian censors in Venice passed his opera only when the king had become a Duke of Mantua and Triboulet had become Rigoletto. The fool’s story could be told, so long as there was no king in it for him to serve.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the license had split in two. The paymaster decided what the fool would be paid to mock. The censor decided what could be shown being mocked, even in a fiction set three centuries back. Neither license belonged to the fool, and both could be withdrawn by people he never met. Hugo, though, did something Armstrong never could. He took the censor to court in public, and called what had been taken from him by its right name: his property. He lost, and went on writing.

III

The Muzzle

In November 1937 Lord Halifax went to Germany. He wasn’t yet Foreign Secretary. He was Lord President of the Council, travelling on an invitation to Göring’s International Hunting Exhibition in Berlin. On November 19 he lunched with Hitler at Berchtesgaden. Before leaving Berlin he met Göring and Goebbels. According to Timothy Benson, the historian who wrote Low and the Dictators, Goebbels singled out one cartoonist for complaint: David Low of Lord Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard, a New Zealander whose cartoons of Hitler were banned in Germany.

Halifax came home, in the historian Tim Bouverie’s words, “determined to curb him.” He went first to the paper. “You cannot imagine the frenzy that these cartoons cause,” he told Michael Wardell of the Standard, as Benson gives it. Wardell’s answer was that it wasn’t his to give. He couldn’t control Low, he said, because Low’s contract put the cartoonist beyond the paper’s reach. The license had moved. It wasn’t the king’s, or the paymaster’s, or even the proprietor’s. Low held it by contract, and a cabinet minister who wanted it narrowed had to ask the man himself.

So Halifax asked. The two met for lunch at Wardell’s flat in Bayswater, where Halifax asked Low to tone down his cartoons for the sake of the government’s search for peace. Low later recalled what he was told. Hitler had the cartoons brought to him and laid on his desk, and “finished always with an explosion.” Low answered that he didn’t want to be responsible for a war, but that he had a duty to say what he saw. Then, in the words Benson gives him, he agreed: “I’ll slow down a bit.”

In a rain-dark London dining room, a tall man in a dark suit gestures across a lunch table toward a man reading a page of cartoons; a leather muzzle lies on the white cloth between them
A lunch in Bayswater, made for this essay.

On January 1, 1938, the Evening Standard introduced a new character. He was a composite dictator with Hitler’s features and Mussolini’s, identified as neither, and his name was Muzzler. The name told anyone paying attention what had happened. Feste called himself not a fool but a “corrupter of words,” and Low had found the fool’s last resort. When he couldn’t say a thing plainly, he bent a word until it said it for him.

It lasted until March. When Hitler annexed Austria, Low decided that his restraint was buying nothing, and Hitler came back into the cartoons under his own name.

What makes the episode worth telling isn’t that Low was pressed. Fools have always been pressed. It’s where the pressing happened and who did it. The objection began with a dictatorship and was carried by a British minister to a newspaper, which declined to carry it further. It was settled over a private lunch, with no order, no court and no record, until the men involved wrote their memoirs. Hugo lost in public and kept his objection on the record in a preface. Low kept, by contract, the right to be asked. What he gave in return was ten weeks of a word that meant muzzle.

IV

The Owner

Ann Telnaes had drawn editorial cartoons for The Washington Post since 2008. She submitted a sketch of a group of technology and media owners paying court to the president-elect. In her own list, they were Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Patrick Soon-Shiong of the Los Angeles Times, the Walt Disney Company, drawn as a prostrate Mickey Mouse, and the owner of her own paper, Jeff Bezos, all bringing Donald Trump their offerings.

The paper’s opinion editor, David Shipley, declined to run it. The Post had just published a column on the same subject and had a satire already scheduled, he said, and “the only bias was against repetition.”

Telnaes resigned on January 3, 2025, and explained why the next day, on her own Substack. Her sketches had been rejected before, she wrote, “but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary.” Then: “That’s a game changer…and dangerous for a free press.” She kept drawing, for the readers who followed her to her Substack, Open Windows.

In May the Pulitzer Board gave her its prize for Illustrated Reporting and Commentary. The award is listed under “Ann Telnaes of The Washington Post.” The citation praised “piercing commentary on powerful people and institutions” and “a fearlessness that led to her departure from the news organization after 17 years.”

V

Coda

At the end of Twelfth Night the lovers have paired off, and Malvolio has gone with a promise: “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.” The house empties, and Feste is left alone with a song about the wind and the rain. In its last lines he turns from the world’s weather to the company’s business:

A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that’s all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day.

The household fool has become a player, and his licensor is whoever paid to get in.

Telnaes ended up in the same place. In this story, hers is the first case where losing the house didn’t mean losing the audience. Armstrong lost his coat and his place at court. Gillray’s loyalty was bought for a time. Hugo’s play went dark for fifty years. Low bought his freedom back with ten weeks of a pun. Telnaes lost the Post and kept her readers, and the prize followed her out the door. The cost of losing the license has fallen that far, and it isn’t a small thing.

A public can’t pull a coat over anyone’s head. It can stop paying. And it has tastes, habits and loyalties of its own, as every court did, and a fool who strives to please it every day is still pleasing someone. Whether the paying public is the fool’s first free licensor, or only the largest court he has served, is not a question the fool can answer from the stage.

Who’s fool now?

⁂

Shakespeare is quoted from the following online texts: As You Like It 2.7 from the Shakespeare Navigators edition (Eastern Washington University); Twelfth Night 1.5, 3.1 and Malvolio’s exit in 5.1, and King Lear 1.4, from Owl Eyes; the last stanza of Feste’s song in Twelfth Night 5.1 as printed in the Folger Shakespeare. Armstrong’s jest and sentence are quoted as the Dictionary of National Biography gives the Privy Council’s wording, reached through Wikipedia; the Madrid story is told as the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica repeats it, and is presented as a story. Andrea Shannon’s phrase comes from the published abstract of her article “‘Uncouth language to a Princes ears’: Archibald Armstrong, Court Jester, and Early Stuart Politics,” Sixteenth Century Journal 42.1 (2011); the article itself is behind a paywall and was not consulted. The Bishops’ Ban of 1599 is quoted as Wikipedia reproduces it. Gillray’s pension and “a temporary loyalty” are from Newcastle University Special Collections. Victor Hugo’s preface to Le roi s’amuse (dated 30 November 1832) is quoted in this essay’s own translation, checked against three editions of the French. The account of Halifax, Wardell and Low follows Timothy S. Benson’s published account, which draws on Low’s Autobiography (1956) but gives no references; the autobiography itself was not consulted, and the quotations attributed to Halifax and Low are given as Benson gives them. Tim Bouverie’s Appeasement (2019) is quoted from passages reproduced as reader highlights, not from the book. Halifax’s office and the date of his meeting with Hitler are from Hansard, 24 November 1937; the hunting exhibition and the meetings with Göring and Goebbels from Time, 29 November 1937. Ann Telnaes is quoted from her Substack posts of 4 January and 28 December 2025; David Shipley’s statement from NPR, 4 January 2025; the Pulitzer citation from pulitzer.org. The header and interior images were generated with Gemini for this essay and are not historical illustrations; the interior imagines the Bayswater lunch and depicts no one’s likeness. The essay’s starting point was Jill C. Shomer’s “Displaying the Gems of Jester,” Columbia College Today, Fall 2026. Drafted with Claude Opus 5.5; literary editing by Claude Opus 5; copy editing by Gemini.

Essays, Reviews

HOW COMEDY KILLED SATIRE

The weapon that wounded kings and emperors is now just another punchline between commercials.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 1, 2025

In the long arc of literary history, satire has served as a weapon—precise, ironic, and often lethal. It was the art of elegant subversion, wielded by writers who understood that ridicule could wound more deeply than rhetoric. From the comic stages of Athens to the viral feed of TikTok, satire has always been a mirror turned against power. But mirrors can be polished, fogged, or stolen. Today, satire has been absorbed into the voracious machinery of entertainment. Its sting has dulled. Its ambiguity has been flattened. It no longer provokes—it performs.

But what did it once mean to laugh dangerously? In Athens, 423 BCE, Aristophanes staged The Clouds. Socrates appeared not as a revered philosopher but as a dangling charlatan in a basket, teaching young Athenians to twist language until truth dissolved. The joke was more than a joke. It ridiculed sophistry, intellectual fads, and the erosion of civic virtue. The audience laughed, but the laughter was perilous—Socrates himself would later be tried and executed for corrupting the youth. To laugh was to risk.

Two centuries later, in Rome, Juvenal sharpened satire into civic indictment. His Satires accused senators of corruption, women of decadence, and citizens of surrendering their dignity for “bread and circuses.” The phrase endures because it captured a political truth: distraction is the oldest tool of power. Juvenal’s lines were barbed enough to threaten exile. Was he clown or conscience? In truth, he was both, armed with venom.

What happens when laughter moves from the tavern into the church? During the Renaissance, Erasmus wrote The Praise of Folly, putting words of critique into the mouth of Folly herself. Popes, princes, pedants—all were skewered by irony. Erasmus knew that Folly could say what he could not, in an age when heresy trials ended in fire. Is irony a shield, or a sword? François Rabelais answered with giants. His sprawling Gargantua and Pantagruel gorged on food, sex, and grotesque humor, mocking scholasticism and clerical hypocrisy. Laughter here was not polite—it was unruly, earthy, subversive. The Church censored, readers copied, the satire lived on.

And what of Machiavelli? Was The Prince a straight-faced manual for power, or a sly parody exposing its ruthlessness? “Better to be feared than loved” reads as either strategy or indictment. If satire is a mirror, what does it mean when the mirror shows only cold pragmatism? Perhaps the ambiguity itself was the satire.

By the seventeenth century, satire had found its most enduring disguise: the novel. Cervantes’s Don Quixote parodied the exhausted chivalric romances of Spain, sending his deluded knight tilting at windmills. Is this comedy of madness, or a lament for a lost moral world? Cervantes left the reader suspended between mockery and mourning. A century later, Alexander Pope wrote The Rape of the Lock, transforming a petty quarrel over a stolen lock of hair into an epic drama. Why inflate the trivial to Homeric scale? Because by exaggerating, Pope revealed the emptiness of aristocratic vanity, exposing its fragility through rhyme.

Then came the most grotesque satire of all: Swift’s A Modest Proposal. What kind of society forces a writer to suggest, with impeccable deadpan, that poor families sell their children as food? The horror was the point. By treating human suffering in the cold language of economics, Swift forced readers to recognize their own monstrous indifference. Do we still have the stomach for satire that makes us gag?

Voltaire certainly thought so. In Candide (1759), he set his naïve hero wandering through war, earthquake, and colonial exploitation, each scene puncturing the optimistic doctrine that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” Candide repeats the phrase until it collapses under its own absurdity. Was Voltaire laughing or grieving? The satire dismantled not only Leibnizian philosophy but the pieties of church and state. The novel spread like wildfire, banned and beloved, dangerous because it exposed the absurdity of power’s justifications.

By the nineteenth century, satire had taken on a new costume: elegance. Oscar Wilde, with The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), skewered Victorian morality, marriage, and identity through dazzling wordplay and absurd plot twists. “The truth is rarely pure and never simple,” Wilde’s characters remind us, a line as sharp as Swift’s grotesqueries but dressed in lace. Wilde’s satire was aesthetic subversion: exposing hypocrisy not with shock but with wit so light it almost floated, until one realized it was dynamite. Even comedy of manners could destabilize when written with Wilde’s smile and sting.

And still, into the modern age, satire carried power. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 in 1961 named the absurd circularity of military bureaucracy. “Catch-22” entered our lexicon, becoming shorthand for the paradoxes of modern life. What other art form can gift us such a phrase, a permanent tool of dissent, smuggled in through laughter?

But something changed. When satire migrated from pamphlets and novels to television, radio, and eventually social media, did it lose its danger? Beyond the Fringe in 1960s London still carried the spirit of resistance, mocking empire and militarism with wit. Kurt Vonnegut wrote novels that shredded war and bureaucracy with absurdist bite. Yet once satire was packaged as broadcast entertainment, the satirist became a host, the critique a segment, the audience consumers. Can dissent survive when it must break for commercials?

There were moments—brief, electrifying—when satire still felt insurgent. Stephen Colbert’s October 2005 coinage of “truthiness” was one. “We’re not talking about truth,” he told his audience, “we’re talking about something that seems like truth—the truth we want to exist.” In a single satirical stroke, Colbert mocked political spin, media manipulation, and the epistemological fog of the post-9/11 era. “Truthiness” entered the lexicon, even became Word of the Year. When was the last time satire minted a concept so indispensable to describing the times?

Another moment came on March 4, 2009, when Jon Stewart turned his sights on CNBC during the financial crisis. Stewart aired a brutal montage of Jim Cramer, Larry Kudlow, and other personalities making laughably wrong predictions while cheerleading Wall Street. “If I had only followed CNBC’s advice,” Stewart deadpanned, “I’d have a million dollars today—provided I’d started with a hundred million dollars.” The joke landed like an indictment. Stewart wasn’t just mocking; he was exposing systemic complicity, demanding accountability from a financial press that had become entertainment. It was satire that bit, satire that drew blood.

Yet those episodes now feel like the last gasp of real satire before absorption. Stewart left his desk, Colbert shed his parody persona for a safer role as late-night host. The words they gave us—truthiness, CNBC’s complicity—live on, but the satirical force behind them has been folded into the entertainment economy.

Meanwhile, satire’s safe zones have shrunk. Political correctness, designed to protect against harm, has also made ambiguity risky. Irony is flattened into literal meaning, especially online. A satirical tweet ripped from context can end a career. Faced with this minefield, many satirists preemptively dilute their work, choosing clarity over provocation. Is it any wonder the result is content that entertains but rarely unsettles?

Corporations add another layer of constraint. Once the targets of satire, they now sponsor it—under conditions. A network late-night host may mock Wall Street, but carefully, lest advertisers revolt. Brands fund satire as long as it flatters their values. When outrage threatens revenue, funding dries up. Doesn’t this create a new paradox, where satire exists only within the boundaries of what its sponsors will allow? Performers of dissent, licensed by the very forces they lampoon.

And the erosion of satire’s political power continues apace. Politicians no longer fear satire—they embrace it. They appear on comedy shows, laugh at themselves, retweet parodies. The spectacle swallows the subversion. If Aristophanes risked exile and Swift risked scandal, today’s satirists risk nothing but a dip in ratings. Studies suggest satire still sharpens critical thinking, but when was the last time it provoked structural change?

So where does satire go from here? Perhaps it will retreat into forms that cannot be so easily consumed: encrypted narratives layered in metaphor, allegorical fiction that critiques through speculative worlds, underground performances staged outside the reach of advertisers and algorithms. Perhaps the next Voltaire will be a coder, the next Wilde a playwright in some forgotten theater, the next Swift a novelist smuggling critique into allegory. Satire may have to abandon laughter altogether to survive as critique.

Imagine again The Laughing Chamber, a speculative play in which citizens are required to submit jokes to a Ministry of Cultural Dissent. Laughter becomes a loyalty test. The best submissions are broadcast in a nightly “Mock Hour,” hosted by a holographic jester. Rebellion is scripted, applause measured, dissent licensed. Isn’t our entertainment already inching toward that? When algorithms decide which jokes are safe enough to go viral, which clips are profitable, which laughter is marketable, haven’t we already built the laughing chamber around ourselves?

Satire once held a mirror to power and said, “Look what you’ve become.” Aristophanes mocked philosophers, Juvenal mocked emperors, Erasmus mocked bishops, Rabelais mocked pedants, Cervantes mocked knights, Pope mocked aristocrats, Swift mocked landlords, Voltaire mocked philosophers, Wilde mocked Victorians, Heller mocked generals, Stewart mocked the financial press, Colbert mocked the epistemology of politics. Each used laughter as a weapon sharp enough to wound authority. What does it mean when that mirror is fogged, the reflection curated, the laughter canned?

And yet, fragments of power remain. We still speak of “bread and circuses,” “tilting at windmills,” “truthiness,” “Catch-22.” We quote Wilde: “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” We hear Voltaire’s refrain—“all is for the best”—echoing with bitter irony in a world of war and crisis. These phrases remind us that satire once reshaped language, thought, even imagination itself. The question is whether today’s satirists can once again make the powerful flinch rather than chuckle.

Until then, we live in the laughing chamber: amused, entertained, reassured. The joke is on us.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI