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Fitting the Bill: The Trickster in American Popular Culture
| Article
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16928 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1990 |
3,127 Words |
| Author
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Jack Santino
Jack Santino is associate professor of folklore and popular
culture at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green,
Indiana. |
From the Keystone Cops to Police Academy, from Charlie Chaplin to David Letterman, from Bob Dylan to Prince: American popular culture is and always has been rife with tricksters.
Scholars use the term trickster broadly, including within it the numbskull, the clown, the jester, the holy fool, and the chaos-bringer. Most of our comedians fit the bill. Charlie Chaplin's antics called into question the society we live in and its values. Certainly the Keystone Cops of yesterday's films and the Police Academy students of today's bring chaos to every situation they encounter. So did John Belushi in the seventies and Sam Kinnison in the eighties, while at the same time they challenged our ideas of how comedians are supposed to behave and what is appropriate for television. Remember, Belushi first came to us as a member of the "Not Ready for Prime-Time Players."
In the fifties and sixties Lucille Ball played a classic numbskull who usually triumphed in the end; she was a kind of holy fool. Other television tricksters include virtually every role James Garner ever played, including Jim Rockford, but especially Bret Maverick, while M*A*S*H gave us Alan Alda's inspired Hawkeye. Today, MacGyver connives his way out of every trap he finds himself in.
Rock music, from Elvis Presley to Michael Jackson, regularly serves up androgynous, shaman-like figures who challenge cultural norms. In the late sixties, John Lennon consciously adopted the role of the holy fool as he and his wife Yoko Ono staged "bed-ins for peace." Lennon was adapting to his own use a persona that had arguably been a part of the appeal of the Beatles since their arrival in the United States in 1964. Paul McCartney even wrote a song in 1967 called "The Fool on the Hill." Bob Dylan's elusiveness and ever-changing musical personas are legendary, and today Prince (especially in his dualistic guise as Gemini) exemplifies the gender-bending, rules chattering rock star. The figures of the clown and holy fool played a large part in sixties counterculture policies as well, specifically in the persons of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman.
Challenging cultural norms by transcending them
All of the above share qualities of elusiveness and ambiguity. They combine opposites such as male and female attributes: thus the androgyny of so may rock stars. It is hard to remember now, but in 1956, Elvis Presley's stage movements, his "cat" clothing, and his long (for the time) hair were
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