God's Fools

From the self-abasements of Charlie Chaplin and Lenny Bruce’s provocations to the present-day culture warring over figures like Dave Chappelle and Hannah Gadsby, comedians have always been not simply entertainers, but charismatic observers of (and participants in) social anxieties and pathologies. Performers as varied as Mort Sahl, Richard Pryor, Margaret Cho, and Louis CK have courted both devotion and outrage at various points in their careers, as they cavort at the outer extremities of taboo, good taste, and received opinion.

In God’s Fools:Laughing Saints, Delirious Prophets, and the Sacred Makers of Comedy religion and literature scholar Jason Crawford gives a penetrating and surprising look at the social role that comedians play by placing them in their proper historical lineage—one that begins not with vaudeville and minstrelry but with the mystics, martyrs, and misfits of the premodern Judeo-Christian world. In Crawford’s expansive account, comedians like Chaplin and Chappelle mingle with such motley historical figures as St. Francis of Assisi, the first-century rabbi Akiba, and the Shakespearean collaborator Robert Armin. In lively and memorable character sketches, Crawford reveals the compelling through-lines that connect these figures to modern comedians, showing how, they attract devotion as exemplars of bad behavior—of a shabbiness transfigured by mystical insight—and act as lightning rods for rejection and punishment during times of deep cultural division.

Jason Crawford holds a doctorate in medieval and early modern literature from Harvard, and he teaches in the English Department at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. He has given lectures and presentations at places such as Duke, Harvard, Cambridge, Baylor, Lee University, and the Warburg Institute, and he has held fellowships at the Huntington Library, at Oxford University, and at the University of Tennessee’s Marco Institute. His writing has appeared both in leading academic journals as well as publications like The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the author of the book Allegory and Enchantment (Oxford University Press, 2017), which was the subject of a symposium at Claremont McKenna College and was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and a range of scholarly journals across multiple fields.