ABSTRACT
The Court Jester, a reeling tale of medieval derring-do and the perilous destabilization of identities, was released by Paramount in 1956 and quickly found favor with the public.1 The film was written and directed by Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, the team responsible for Danny Kaye’s previous vehicles Knock on Wood and White Christmas (both released in 1954). The Court Jester remains one of Kaye’s most successful films, and an influential source for the longstanding popular assessment of Kaye’s sexual identity. The film’s central character, played by Kaye, is the jester Hubert Hawkins, a shifting, liminal figure whose ambiguous identity generates considerable narrative anxiety. In both overt and covert ways the jester is challenged to repudiate his unmanly, ambiguous, and ultimately queer ways and prove he is a hero, a role coterminous with masculinity. In this paradigm of normativity it follows the precedent of medieval tales about jesters and entertainers, which depict them as ambivalent, subversive, disguised, and unknowable. The narrative of the film, moreover, intersects with a second historical paradigm, the widespread belief that, like jesters throughout history, Kaye himself was liminal, ambiguous, and ultimately queer. This conclusion was more informed by cultural concepts of masculinity than by his off-screen behavior, but what audiences saw performed on screen reinforced assumptions about the dangerous liminality of comedy, jesters, and entertainers in both the public and the private sphere. Regardless of their private sexuality, such performers were culturally queer, construed through an interpretive paradigm that regards the public construct of sexuality as definitive.
