ABSTRACT
The sixteenth century saw an explosion of folly discourses, many of which invoked what has now become a familiar distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ fools. The natural fool was the individual with a mental impairment of some kind who might be kept as a source of entertainment, especially in noble or royal households, up until the earlier seventeenth century. More’s report of the Utopians laughing at fools also suggests that laughing at the defective or ugly is not, or at least should not be, quite what is happening in these encounters. Laughing at the reductive physicality of the natural can draw the spectator into the fool’s own sphere, partly dissolving the sense of separation and hierarchical superiority between the two that initiated the jest. The natural’s comical ignorance involves the less ‘glory to ourselves’ in contemptuous comparison to him, because he is not responsible for it and can do nothing to change it.
