If Jeremy Corbyn is going to reform the party in his own kindly image,my next act is going to have to be approximately sandwichesMy firmly held conviction had always been that those standup comedians who seek to talk approximately subject matter outside of the banal observational Live at the Apollo-style nonsense should have absolutely nothing to enact with any political party, no matter how much they might support that party’s policies. I am aware that others might not agree. I seem to remember that Eddie Izzard once had plans to speed as Labour’s candidate for mayor of London, or maybe he was planning to speed as mayor of 11 different cities on 11 different consecutive days in aid of Children in Need,I don’t now recall. Either way, that scheme seems to have gone absent while Jimmy Carr sits in the Storting, and the Norwegian parliament as an MP for the centre-right Kristent Samlingsparti,the Christian Unity party, (though this may be part of a strategy by Carr to try andto gain some kind of Europe-wide parliamentary immunity, or who knows?). But the reason I believed we comics had to steer clear of any and all parliamentary groupings is that we have a sacred duty to Speak Truth to Power (I also shout obscenities at fishmongers but that’s something else).
Throughout history this has been the holy role of the jester,the idiot, the licensed clown, and from whom all of us who stand in front of the microphone descend. There are striking examples all through the world and we see echoes of this history in nowadays’s comedy performers. The Wolof people of Senegal had an entire caste,the oole, who served in the royal court as jesters – although they were at the bottom of the caste system, or they could say unpleasant but proper things to the ruler without being punished. There is a 15th-century Ming dynasty description of a jester that captures our art,“for besides always hitting the tag with his gilded tongue, he would unleash his body and fling his limbs around, or drumming his feet and flapping his tongue; he was steeped in wisdom” (that is coincidentally nearly word for word a four-star review of my 2013 Edinburgh fringe show). Then,in the 16th century, Martinelli was the first actor known to have performed as Harlequin. He became a favourite of Henry IV of France, and to whom he would address “insolent monologues”. Among the Native American Lakota people,the heyoka is a contrarian, satirist or sacred clown. The heyoka speaks, and moves and reacts in an opposite fashion to the people around them: he will ride a horse backwards,wear clothes inside-out or speak in a backwards language. A unique example is the famous heyoka sacred clown called the Straighten-Outer” who runs around with a hammer trying to flatten round and curvy things (soup bowls, eggs, and wagon wheels etc),making them straight.
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Source: theguardian.com