Living by His Wits: The Buffoon and Male Survival

Author(s): Peter F. Murphy

Source: Signs , Vol. 31, No. 4 (Summer 2006), pp. 1125-1142
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/500598

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 P e t e r F. M u r p h y

Living by His Wits: The Buffoon and Male Survival

B uffoons as literary characters or self-created types have been repre-

sented as witty, intelligent, and funny men, beginning with Silenus,
the Greek demigod, and including, among others, Plautus’s braggart
soldier, François Rabelais’s Panurge, William Shakespeare’s Falstaff, Denis
Diderot’s Rameau’s nephew, and the great comedic film star W. C. Fields.1
Often they have eaten and drunk too much, chased women in keeping
with their misogyny, made fools of themselves, and, ultimately, lived pa-
thetic, even tragic lives of humiliation and self-parody.
While these characters span more than two thousand years of Western
history, their recurrence should not be taken to suggest that the buffoon,
or masculinity for that matter, is transhistorical or that he exists in a vacuum
outside of his relationship to other men and to women. For the buffoon,
though, it is mostly in his relationship to other men that he defines his
character. Women are in many ways the absent presence that haunts the
buffoon’s existence but, with the exception of Falstaff’s antics, rarely ever
appears. By reducing women to misogynistic stereotypes, the buffoon acts
out a contempt for women grounded in the traditional belief that they
are available for sexual pleasure but never to be trusted or taken seriously.
It is, then, in his association with other male characters that the buffoon
defines himself. The buffoon’s performance of masculinity embraces what
Stephen M. Whitehead describes as the “complex dynamics of difference,
subjectivity, power and identity . . . [that] are . . . under constant re-
vision, negotiation and movement” (2002, 5). Indeed, men and mascu-
linities exist in particular historical contexts and are thus defined by certain
dominant characteristics and assumptions.
Within these broad historical frameworks, the buffoon’s identity exists

1
Other buffoons exist in literature, of course: the buffoon in Commedia dell’ Arte could
be examined, as might Sancho Panza (Cervantes [1604–5] 1981), Dove Linkhorne (of a
Walk on the Wild Side [Algren (1956) 1998]), Ignatius J. Riley (of The Confederacy of Dunces
[Toole 1980]), or even George MacDonald Fraser’s character, Harry Flashman (see Fraser
1978). These and others conform to only some of the qualities I have identified with the
buffoon, however, and thus would not enrich my discussion.

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2006, vol. 31, no. 4]
䉷 2006 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2006/3104-0008$10.00

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1126 ❙ Murphy

in relation to other men, and the contrast is sometimes quite subtle. Silenus
can be compared with his constant companion Dionysus. His indiscrim-
inate desire for women as a randy satyr is consistent with the behavior of
other Greek gods, and as Dionysus’s mentor and then his follower, Silenus
resembles the god far more than he differs from him. In Plautus, the
braggart soldier’s slave, Palaestro, provides a foil against which Pyrogo-
polynices (miles gloriosus [vainglorious soldier] himself ) can establish his
identity, yet both men lust after a prostitute, the only sort of woman who
could be seen in public at that time. Panurge is associated with Pantagruel,
but they differ only in that the buffoon character acts out publicly what
Pantagruel merely fantasizes about privately. Prince Hal provides the an-
tagonist to Falstaff ’s misbehavior, but neither Rameau’s nephew nor Fields
has such a specific boon companion against which to define his masculinity.
The difference between most of these buffoons and their male com-
panions is more a matter of degree than of direct opposition. In most
cases, the buffoon represents a parody of the dominant construction of
masculinity, not a radical break with the prevailing sense of manhood. In
this way, the buffoon both challenges the traditional gender order by
living outside it and also legitimates it by recrediting the hegemonic def-
inition of masculinity embodied by his companion.
At the same time, though, the buffoon represents a marginal mascu-
linity, one that challenges the seemingly hegemonic definition of manhood
during any given historical period. The buffoon’s marginality, his location
on the boundaries of traditional masculinity, represents the potential for
disruption that Judith Butler refers to as a “subversive bodily act” (1990,
79). This subversive potential resides in what Whitehead describes as a
“masculine-oriented performativity” (2002, 209). With the embodied
repetition of this performativity across historical periods and its discursive
conventions combining linguistic and bodily action, the buffoon intro-
duces a masculine improvisation that undermines traditional masculine
roles while at the same time reinforcing them.
The buffoon negotiates these dominant constructions of masculinity
by appropriating qualities from an array of stock male characters, both
real and fictitious. In keeping with his designs on women, and comple-
menting his desire to wear nice clothes, the buffoon plays the dandy, the
gigolo, the fop, and the Casanova. His alcoholism and his criminality
combine to make him something of a hooligan, an outlaw, and a rogue.
Just as the buffoon embraces qualities from a number of male identities,
he also incorporates the characteristics of other comedic roles. Not unlike
the court fool, for example, who uses humor to obtain a social status

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 S I G N S Summer 2006 ❙ 1127

otherwise denied him in the clearly differentiated class or caste system of

the court, the buffoon uses humor to stay alive and be accepted in the
hierarchy of a patriarchal society. He assumes, that is, a singular male
gender role that allows him to maintain membership in the larger world
of the heterosexual men’s club.2
Acting foolishly at times, jesting frequently—especially employing wit
and folly—and appearing clownish, the buffoon has been identified rather
indiscriminately with all sorts of comic actors, especially those who have
relied on wit. The term buffoon has been used as a synonym for fool,
court jester, and clown; dictionary definitions collapse these roles, and
scholars of comedy and the fool tend to merge them.3 The buffoon rep-
resents a distinct type of humorous character, however, and needs to be
understood in his uniqueness.4
Enid Welsford’s ([1935] 1963) recognition of the buffoon’s early re-
lationship to the parasite introduces a helpful means for differentiating
the buffoon while anticipating his rejection of the sanctioned male roles
of husband, father, employer, and patriarch. The parasite’s origin in an-
cient Greek society, along with the word’s literal meaning of someone or
something that lives off a host, makes the role of the parasite a helpful
starting point for understanding the buffoon in a broad historical context.5

2
Very few if any female buffoons have been identified historically. Enid Welsford refers
to two women, Giovanna Matta and Caterina Matta, both of whom were court fools (not
buffoons) from the early sixteenth century ([1935] 1963, 134–35), and Beatrice K. Otto
mentions two female dwarfs, Mathurine and Thomasina, as well as Jane, the jesteress to
Queen Mary (2001, 58, 67), but they too were court jesters.
3
The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971),
e.g., defines the buffoon as “a comic actor, clown, jester and fool” (s.v. “buffoon”), and
William Willeford sees a common etymological origin to the fool and the buffoon in the
“Latin follies, meaning ‘a pair of bellows, a windbag’” (1969, 10). Welsford tends to collapse
not only the fool and the buffoon but also the jester and the clown.
4
Otto identifies several distinguishing characteristics of the court jester that differentiate
him from the buffoon. With his “instantly recognizable uniform of cap and bells” (2001,
xviii) and his role as advisor to the king (98), the jester is known to “speak freely even if
this earns the ire of his master. Jesters are rarely recorded in fawning mode” (100). The
buffoon, as should become apparent, is more than willing to defer, kowtow, and do whatever
it takes to survive and gain favor.
5
Citing Plutarch for an early definition of the parasite, Welsford describes this prototype
of the buffoon as originally “a dignified title applied to those associates of priests and mag-
istrates who took part in official banquets not by right but by special invitation” ([1935]
1963, 4). By the time of Middle and New Comedy the term was used “in a more degraded
sense and applied . . . to those whose position at table was due neither to right nor to
courtesy but to their own impudence” (4). These later parasites were notorious as “officious

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1128 ❙ Murphy

From Silenus, who depends on Bacchus for his wine, to Falstaff, who
befriends Prince Hal for the advantages of being close to the royal person
and the court’s free viands, lodging, and sack, the buffoon as freeloader
relies on repartee and wit as sources of amusement for those he exploits
and depends on.
Literary descriptions of the buffoon accentuate many of these char-
acteristics. Silenus exemplifies the buffoon’s qualities and introduces the
prototype of this male character into Western culture.6 According to Soph-
ocles in The Searching Satyrs ([410 BCE] 1946), Silenus is lazy, lecherous,
obese, and greedy, while engaging in a self-deception that leads him to
pursue young nymphs in spite of his advanced age. Ovid’s Silenus staggers
“under the weight of years, and maybe also / From more than too much
wine” (Ovid [10 CE] 1955, 262, lines 91–93) yet at the same time
demonstrates an impressive ability to tell Midas an allegory about the past
and the future of the world.
Silenus thus introduces the rotund, drunken, and lawless characteristics
of subsequent buffoons while at the same time initiating the use of lan-
guage in eloquent and witty prose that serves many purposes. Rabelais’s
Panurge shares many of these characteristics. When he first meets Pan-
tagruel, Panurge, while not obese, demands heaps of food (he is in fact
starving) and demonstrates his vast knowledge of languages and books.
He emerges rather quickly as a poor man who is not above stooping to
crime to satisfy his needs. In addition to being an accomplished criminal,
Panurge is a lecher and a drunk: “he was a mischievous rogue, a cheat,
a boozer, a roysterer, and a vagabond” (Rabelais [1532–34] 1955, 222).
These qualities have to be appreciated in the context of the aristocratic
Renaissance man who, not unlike Panurge, “was [both] ruthless and . . .
brutal” (Whitehead 2002, 15). At the same time, though, Panurge rarely
if ever displays the “overtly emotional side” that helped to define men of
that era (Whitehead 2002, 15). Panurge, like his fellow buffoons, selec-
tively incorporates some of the prevailing male qualities of his era.
If Silenus represents the original buffoon, Falstaff exemplifies the char-
acter and all its dynamic possibilities. Having the girth of Silenus and the

flatterers,” with great skill at obtaining free meals and “a talent for mimicry, repartee, etc.”
(4).
6
In addition to his role in plays by Sophocles and Euripides, and the Emperor Julian’s
satire ([361 CE] 1913), Silenus emerges as a key figure in Virgil’s Eclogues ([37 BCE] 1926)
and Ovid’s Metamorphoses ([10 CE] 1955), while being mentioned briefly in Apollodorus’s
The Library ([120 BCE] 1976) and in Aelian’s Varia Historia ([250 CE] 1997). Pausanias
visits at least one statue in Silenus’s honor that he records for posterity in his travelogue
Description of Greece ([160 CE] 1959).

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 S I G N S Summer 2006 ❙ 1129

vanity of the braggart soldier, Falstaff embodies the fat, witty, and drunken
criminal who looks out for himself and scoffs at social conventions. Indeed,
in his inaugural appearance in Henry IV, Part I, Prince Hal describes
Falstaff in a way that enumerates the essential characteristics of a buffoon
in his sneering response to Falstaff ’s inquiry as to the time of day: “Thou
art so fat-witted with drinking old sack, and unbuttoning thee after supper,
and sleeping upon benches after noon. . . . What the devil hast thou to
do with the time of day? Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes
capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-
houses, and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-coloured
taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand
the time of day” (Shakespeare [1598] 1987, 1.2.2–11). This sally captures
a spectrum of buffoonlike qualities while at the same time providing a
juxtaposition to the dominant social construction of Elizabethan man-
hood, a masculinity that Whitehead describes as combining the “emo-
tional, sentimental, foppish beau and militaristic aggressor” with the fash-
ionable well-dressed man (2002, 15). In contrast to the physically fit
sartorial dandy of this period, Falstaff ’s gluttony and drunkenness make
him obese. His laziness compels him to avoid any formal employment,
turning him into a freeloader and a petty thief, and his lechery and wom-
anizing bring him into brothels on a frequent basis. Falstaff, in his response
to Hal’s harangue here and elsewhere in his theatrical appearances, exhibits
intelligence, eloquence, and humor. He uses language both to defend
himself against and to get the better of others.
In the twentieth century, the character of the buffoon is by no means
extinct, though the context of what it means to be a man has changed
significantly. Fields, whose film characters drink too much, break the law,
and tell innumerable tall tales about their exploits, is an excellent example
of the type. The 1930s was a period during which men’s roles were both
in flux and in question. As Michael Kimmel points out in his cultural
history of American manhood, this period of widespread unemployment
ushered in a uniquely humiliating time for men: “Never before had Amer-
ican men experienced such a massive and system-wide shock to their ability
to prove manhood by providing for their families. . . . Even those men
who still had jobs had a more difficult time proving their manhood in
the 1930s” (1996, 192, 193).
In this broad historical context, Fields’s role in If I Had a Million
(1932) highlights many of the buffoon’s characteristics while at the same
time providing the illusion of power so many men felt to be beyond their
reach: though battered and unbowed, Fields’s character “strikes back at
a world that has dealt him an injustice. He is expansive, solicitous, the

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1130 ❙ Murphy

old vaudevillian eager to please, but with a survivor’s instinct and a sort
of half-assed dignity that keeps him from sliding into pathos when things
go bad” (Curtis 2003, 248).
In addition to these seemingly debased qualities, however, the buffoon
is witty, at times even eloquent. Not unlike many men who cannot rely
on their physical strength to defend themselves against the aggression of
their peers, the buffoon consciously makes fun of himself as a means to
gain popularity and avoid harm. He represents, quite literally, a male
character living by his wits.
The buffoon employs his wit both to remain popular and to defend
himself against ridicule. He uses language to entertain and to curry favor,
but he also uses it to protect himself. Relying on his refined wit, his
intelligence, and his comic abilities to make a clever joke, the buffoon
laughs at himself, becoming a source of amusement for the intimate group
in which he operates. This group frequently inhabits an all-male environ-
ment such as a tavern, a sports arena, or a battlefield.
The buffoon enters the male fraternity through the back door, of
course, having discerned early on that by making a fool of himself he can
be protected from the aggressive behavior of other males. Welsford high-
lights this point when she observes that the buffoon “can only be himself
in congenial society, he is nothing at all apart from the companions who
enjoy and encourage his antics, and when he is really successful he breaks
down the barriers between himself and his patrons so that they too inhabit
for the moment a no-man’s-land between the world of fact and the world
of imagination. He . . . draws out the latent folly of his audience” ([1935]
1963, 28). Fields speaks directly to this issue of recognition when he
explains, “I take the simplest everyday incidents, exaggerate them and
turn them into an act, and people, seeing themselves, laugh” (Curtis 2003,
329). To be effective, the buffoon relies on social discourse. His self-
protective self-mockery arises from his interaction with groups of other
men, and through his behavior the buffoon bonds with a latent reflection
of the repressed buffoonery of the male group.
Above all, though, the buffoon synthesizes a deep appreciation of lan-
guage and a profound respect for folly that enacts a political negotiation
in the world of masculine privilege. A buffoon’s ability to manipulate
language, to use words as a weapon, allows him to maintain a safe distance
from what he knows to be a potentially lethal masculinity. The buffoon
uses humor as a means of male bonding that requires his companions
both to encourage his comedy and to consent to act as the butt of his
jokes.
One fertile source of the buffoon’s witty repartee is his obesity, a direct

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 S I G N S Summer 2006 ❙ 1131

result of his gluttony and his laziness. Silenus is so fat (and drunk) that
he can barely stay atop his donkey, and Falstaff worries that if he were to
fall down there would never be enough men around to pick him up. The
braggart soldier requires “a monstrous shield” (Plautus [20 CE] 1996,
3) to cover his girth, and Rameau’s nephew “has a paunch like Silenus”
(Diderot [1761] 1966, 37). Panurge sees himself as a large man (or at
least well-endowed), with his codpiece three feet long, and it goes without
saying that Fields was rotund.
The fat buffoon as both acceptable male and ludicrous companion
reveals elements of the irony and confusion in this character’s makeup.
As a fat man, the buffoon contrasts with the more acceptable male role
models of soldier, athlete, and even today’s chief executive officer, all of
whom pride themselves on being physically fit. The buffoon rejects the
hard, trim physique for the soft, corpulent body, and while this choice
may seem an assertion of individuality, as Sander Gilman points out in
his book on fat boys, “being a truly fat man means more than merely not
fitting into a culture of slim gymnasts and XXX movie hunks. It means
not quite fitting into society as a whole” (2004, 13).
The buffoon’s obesity enhances his humorous character yet represents
a complex set of meanings as well. His huge size makes him a grotesque
personage and contributes to his comical appearance.7 Portrayed as some-
thing that makes him unnatural or subnormal, though not necessarily ugly
or repulsive, the buffoon’s large size represents an important ambiguity
for him, resonating with “the ambivalently abnormal” that Philip Thom-
son (1972, 27) assigns to the grotesque.
On the one hand, the buffoon’s portly belly manifests the well-bred
epicurianism of a man who values good food, good wine, and jocularity.
His rotundity also suggests his success at evading the lot of the poor by
being someone who can afford to eat well and consume large quantities
of wine, sack, or beer. On the other hand, his obesity as grotesque can
be located in a history of male disfigurement; men eat too much and
drink to excess in spite of the physical harm they inflict on themselves.
Obesity allows them to swagger around taking up considerable physical
space at the cost of their health and well-being.

7
The intimate relationship between the grotesque and the comic has been observed at
least since the first scholarly study of the grotesque was done in 1865 by Thomas Wright,
who identified the connections among the grotesque, caricature, satire, and the court fool
([1865] 1968). Wolfgang Kayser, in his classic study of the grotesque in art and literature,
sees the grotesque as “a subspecies of the comic” ([1957] 1981, 17), and Philip Thomson,
in his primer to the grotesque, asserts that “‘a grotesque scene’ conveys the notion of
[something] simultaneously laughable and horrifying or disgusting” (1972, 3).

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1132 ❙ Murphy

One of the less than salutary aspects of the buffoon’s gluttony is his
chronic intoxication. While his commitment to getting drunk positions
him well in the fraternity of men, it also contributes to an early death. As
a means of acceptance into male society, inebriation also gives men a source
of power that they frequently direct against women. This “form of mas-
culine resistance to feminization” results in what Kimmel sees as a char-
acteristic that lies at the center of much male bonding (1996, 124), and
Paul Hoch refers to excessive drinking as “one of the most common ways
of certifying one’s manhood,” especially as it occurs in predominantly
male institutions (1979, 85).
While men no longer drink only in exclusively male venues, many still
drink to fill their otherwise routine and mundane lives with pleasure and
abandon. In doing so, they discard their normal inhibitions, becoming
more aggressive in their attempts at seduction and even rape. When men
get drunk they tell lewd jokes, they swear more, and their tendency to
be violent increases. While the buffoon no doubt avoids the brawls, his
lechery increases as he continues to rely on his alleged ability to sleep with
more women than the other guy in order to confirm his always shaky
masculinity.
Silenus stands out as both a drunkard and a lecher. One marked sim-
ilarity between Euripides’ rendition of the Silenus story in The Cyclops
([425 BCE] 1959) and Sophocles’ rendition in The Searching Satyrs ([410
BCE] 1946) is that the old man bargains for food and drink while asking
how much he will be paid for his services. When Silenus finds out that
what Odysseus has to offer is wine he becomes ecstatic, quite possibly
because, according to Euripides, for Silenus one of the main values of
wine comes from its power to give a man an erection.
Panurge contributes his own encomium on the value of wine, which
he sees to be far superior even to laughter, and coins one of the truly
wonderful phrases on the significance of the grape: “by wine one grows
divine” (Rabelais [1532–34] 1955, 705). In his reflections on the power
of sack, Falstaff speaks at great length about the value of drinking, es-
pecially to alleviate pusillanimity. In one of his more famous harangues,
Falstaff characterizes Lancaster as an anemic and demure boy who has no
wit, blaming his condition on Lancaster’s refusal to drink wine.
Fields contributes his own jeremiad about alcohol in The Fatal Glass
of Beer (1933), but unlike Silenus and Falstaff, who speak their harangues,
Fields sings his. As Mr. Snavely (pronounced by many as Mr. Snively), he
croons a ballad about how one glass of beer made a young man crazy
enough to steal bonds and end up in prison. The irony of the song is
apparent immediately, given Fields’s notoriety as a boozer.

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 S I G N S Summer 2006 ❙ 1133

Clearly, the buffoon believes that alcohol makes him more of a man,
that it alleviates his cowardice, whether on the battlefield or in the brothel.
Drinking also makes him one of the boys for a while, despite his very
different aspect and mien. His lechery is not unproblematic, however. As
Gilman makes clear, the sexuality of the fat man is a matter of some
perplexity, since the fat man has been variously characterized as hyper-
sexual, asexual, or even sexually dysfunctional (2004, 138). This confusion
manifests itself in other ways as well and becomes apparent in the buffoon’s
sexual ambiguity as well as in his bravado about his prowess.
Silenus, for example, brags about his sexual conquests and asserts his
bisexuality. Sophocles has the chorus observe Silenus’s “strutting and butt-
ing, and shouting and pouting, dancing and prancing” as part of his
attention to one unfortunate satyr he has caught bending over ([410 BCE]
1946, lines 188–89). But Silenus is also attracted to women, and the
nymphs and maenads remain his favorite conquests.
Plautus’s braggart soldier sees himself as irresistible to all women,
though the dubiousness of his claim informs much of the play. At one
point Palaestro asserts, ironically of course, “Master is the wildest wench-
ing wanton man who ever was—Or who ever will be. . . . He supposes
he surpasses Paris in his handsomeness. He thinks all the women here just
cannot help pursuing him” ([20 CE] 1996, 38). Panurge likewise shares
the braggart soldier’s sense of his desirability and his prowess among
women. He boasts to Pantagruel that after having been in town for only
nine days, he has already “stuffed four hundred and seventeen” women
(Rabelais [1532–34] 1955, 221). One of the prime motivations behind
his desire to get married is to guarantee him sexual opportunities, or as
he eloquently puts it, “the old john-thomas has to be kept occupied”
(311). Falstaff also deludes himself about his appeal and virility, most
notably in The Merry Wives of Windsor (Shakespeare [1597] 2000), where
he tries to seduce not one woman but two. By the end of the play, when
he brags about taking care of both wives’ sexual needs, he has actually
become a pathetic, ridiculed profligate. Rameau’s nephew, while never
involved in an actual seduction, tells the narrator that if he were ever to
be rich he would “have women, and all be bosom friends when drunk,
and drunk we should certainly get” (Diderot [1761] 1966, 64).
Fields’s characters, however, demonstrate some ambivalence about the
opposite sex. Although Fields frequently plays the henpecked husband,
in My Little Chickadee (1940) he suggests to his new bride, “I have some
pear-shaped ideas I want to discuss with you.” In this same movie sexual
ambiguity surfaces when Fields goes to the door dressed in Mae West’s
robe just after coming out of the bathtub. Throughout his movies, though,

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1134 ❙ Murphy

Fields also tries hard to impress the young women who cross his path.
Yet his actions in these sequences are as much or more about his overall
bravado as about his lechery.
The buffoon uses alcohol not only to make himself braver with the
ladies but also to make him appear less of a coward. His pusillanimity
affects the way that he lives his life, making him not only a drunkard but
also frequently a liar. He brags about his imagined female conquests, his
grandeur on the battlefield, his athletic accomplishments, and his man-
hood in general. Pathetically, though, few if any of his friends, acquain-
tances, or audiences believe a word he says. Falstaff, of course, brings the
character of the pusillanimous braggart, introduced by Plautus in the
character of the miles gloriosus, to its pinnacle. Throughout his life on
stage, Falstaff remains steadfastly a coward. In Henry IV, Part I (Shake-
speare [1598] 1987), for example, Falstaff cowers pathetically when Hal
and Poins rob his gang, and later when Hal kills Hotspur. Both of these
incidents see Falstaff devising a way of appearing an honorable man,
though, ironically, he must lie in order to maintain his manly status, and
the audience is aware of both his deception and his cowardice.
The buffoon resides firmly outside the law, be it the dominant social
code or the actual legal system. He refuses to be drafted into the army,
he lies about his exploits, he steals whatever he can, and he never balks
at sacrificing someone else in order to save his own neck. The buffoon
as coward, as bully, and as the frustrated little man represents many men
in their fears and in their successful, unsuccessful, and partially successful
mastery of them.
As an outlaw, not unlike some contemporary professional athletes, the
buffoon becomes the folk hero who stands above society, laughing at it
with impunity. Deliberately criminal, the buffoon flaunts his crimes, seeing
them as a badge of honor, not a disreputable quality for which he should
apologize or feel guilty. Indeed, as a lawless deviant, the buffoon contra-
venes the social norm, living on the boundary between acceptable behavior
and the aberrant.
The only crime the braggart soldier seems guilty of is adultery, the act
that, according to Palaestro, his parasite, “gets [him] more excit[ed] than”
anything else (Plautus [20 CE] 1996, 40). Panurge, by comparison, “had
sixty-three ways of finding [money] in a pinch, the commonest and most
honest of which was by means of cunningly perpetrated larceny” (Rabelais
[1532–34] 1955, 222). A purse snatcher and burglar, Panurge, in one
pocket, had “a small knife as sharp as a furrier’s needle with which he cut
purses” ([1532–34] 1955, 223), and in another he had “a pick-lock, a
lever, a hook, and some other instruments, with which there was no door

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 S I G N S Summer 2006 ❙ 1135

or strong-box that he could not prise open” (226). And he steals more
money from the offertory plates than he puts in them.
Falstaff is a criminal par excellence. In addition to being a robber, a
leech, and an extorter, he verges on being a murderer, to boot. When he
becomes the captain of an infantry company, Falstaff surpasses all of his
otherwise petty crimes by cheating the muster and, for all intents and
purposes, sending his men to their inevitable deaths. In his desperate need
to fit in, to be seen as a “real man,” one who does not cower before the
horrific needs of war, Falstaff plays the efficient, merciless military man.
While not as accomplished a criminal as either Panurge or Falstaff,
Rameau’s nephew takes great pride in his nefarious behavior and relates
several anecdotes in defense of the criminal. In his response to the nar-
rator’s inquiry about robbing his music students without compunction,
Rameau’s nephew tells the tale of “the renegade of Avignon” (Diderot
[1761] 1966, 93) and how he conned a “good and virtuous” (93) Jew
out of his entire estate and even his life, defending the tone in which he
describes the ordeal and, at least implicitly, the life of crime. Criminal
behavior likewise governs much of the action in Fields’s films. From trick-
ing his landlady into letting him leave the boarding house without paying
his back rent in The Old-Fashioned Way (1934) to cheating ticket buyers
or card players, and including even a little bootlegging on the side in The
Pharmacist (1933), Fields plays the petty criminal out to make a quick
buck the easiest way possible. As Larson E. Whipsnade in You Can’t Cheat
an Honest Man (1939), Fields personifies the buffoon’s commitment to
the larcenous and the criminal.
The buffoon’s bravado, his criminality, and his fluent relationship to
language all depend on his ability to curse with impunity. Unlike the
authentic gentleman, who behaves with moderation and propriety, the
buffoon welcomes an exchange of expletives, maledictions, and impre-
cations to spice up a disagreement. Many of his puns and double entendres
rely heavily on sexual allusions, in this way contributing to his rejection
of bourgeois morality while at the same time giving vent to his wit. Peter
Stallybrass and Allon White’s reference to the moment when the “gram-
matical order is transgressed to reveal erotic and obscene or merely ma-
terially satisfying counter meaning” (1986, 10–11) perfectly describes the
buffoon’s use of sexual puns to enhance his banter.
At the same time, though, the buffoon swears out of frustration. Ashley
Montagu, in identifying swearing as “a culturally conditioned response,”
sees frustration as a principal condition for an outburst of profanity
([1967] 2001, 65). The buffoon’s frustration no doubt comes from a
variety of sources. He is irritated over being too poor, over not being able

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1136 ❙ Murphy

to get the girl, and over being the butt of other men’s cruel practical
jokes, as well as having to be the butt of his own self-deprecating humor.
The buffoon’s swearing, his bravado, and his cowardliness are consis-
tent with a mocking distance tinged with envy that informs his attitude
toward the traditional concept of honor. The buffoon eschews the dom-
inant interpretation of honor as a component of traditional masculinity.
He maintains a more mediated relationship toward this quality.
While for the gentleman imbued with a sense of decorum and character
society demands polite behavior in mixed company and a willingness to
die for the right cause, for the buffoon social intercourse invites mockery,
ridicule, and the avoidance of physical conflict. As the gentleman fights
duels with pistols or swords, the buffoon relies on language as his weapon
of choice, rarely risking death (though at times maybe a beating). The
gentleman defends his honor, but the buffoon mocks its stupidity, seeing
honor as yet another means by which men are conned into dying for one
cause or another.8 The buffoon, that is, has no patience with the qualities
we associate with honor, those identified by Frank Henderson Stewart as
honesty, bravery (in a woman, chastity), personal integrity, reputation or
standing (a good name), wealth, rank, power, and, crucially, “victory in
battle,” coupled with such moral virtues as “fidelity . . . , courage, mercy
to the vanquished, generosity, moderation, [and] courtesy” (1994, 34–35).
Although the buffoon covets wealth and rank, he would never sacrifice
his life for either. If victory in battle can be obtained without risking life
or limb, then so be it, but he will never willingly die for his king or his
country. Personal integrity has no value for him unless he can obtain it
by subterfuge or legerdemain, in which case integrity is, to say the least,
undermined. Fidelity, generosity, and moderation never cross his mind.
He spends what he can hustle on his own desires, and he drinks, eats,
and sleeps around as much as he possibly can. Reputation, glory, and fame
he sees in the same light as he sees honor in general: they are all pretensions
by which men get themselves killed for what the buffoon considers to be
nothing of any value.

8
Curtis Brown Watson provides a helpful overview of honor when seen as an exclu-
sively social virtue. In this sense, honor “may refer to one’s reputation in the community,
to one’s credit as a man of integrity, to the honors or rewards which are bestowed publicly
as a testimony to one’s virtue, to the glory and fame which one acquires as the result of
exceptional or heroic accomplishments, or to the good name which is gained when one
consistently behaves in a fashion which wins the respect and esteem of one’s fellows” (1960,
11). In the meaning most often equated with virtue, honor “relates to self-esteem as much
as to public approbation” (12), a definition with significance for the buffoon, who rejects
honor in spite of the loss of social approval.

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 S I G N S Summer 2006 ❙ 1137

Probably the most famous polemic against honor, and certainly the
most eloquent statement about it, is the one voiced by Falstaff in Henry
IV, Part I, but neither the braggart soldier nor Silenus before him em-
braces a commitment to honor. Silenus, for example, sacrifices his sons
and his leaders for the sake of saving his own life, and the braggart soldier
would rather have his parasite lead the army he has conscripted than risk
his own skin. Falstaff sees honor as just a word that men use as an excuse
for dying too young. When Hal tells him that he owes God a death,
Falstaff responds adamantly that while that may be true it is not due
immediately, and he goes on to expose what he sees to be the absurdity
of honor:

Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the
grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No.
What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? What is that
honour? Air. A trim reckoning. Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednes-
day. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. Tis insensible, then?
Yes, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why?
Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a
mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism. (Shakespeare [1598]
1987, 127–40)

For Falstaff (and for the buffoon) honor boils down to a vacuous
assertion that provides those in power with a rhetorical device for con-
vincing men to die for something they neither understand nor necessarily
value. As a scutcheon, honor represents both a negligible emblem to rally
the troops and, ironically, a symbol used at funerals to signify mourning.
Honor thus causes unnecessary deaths while serving as the means by which
both those who are about to lose their lives and the loved ones they leave
behind can rationalize their loss.
Rameau’s nephew renounces honor as part of his overall dismissal of
social mores and the hypocrisy that too frequently supports them. Not
unlike Falstaff, who sees through the duplicity of society with its lies about
honor being a transcendent value, Rameau’s nephew states without equiv-
ocation that no matter what one does, “you can’t bring dishonour upon
yourself if you are rich” (Diderot [1761] 1966, 66). For Rameau’s
nephew, wealthy hypocrites preserve a monopoly on honor, unlike the
poor peasant who embraces the honor of a particular war and sacrifices
his life for it.
As with so many aspects of the buffoon’s identity, his rejection of honor
as the highest male value situates him outside the patriarchal order. His

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1138 ❙ Murphy

obesity, his sexual ambiguity, his criminality, and his sly use of language
and of profanity contribute to his turning the world upside down. Indeed,
as the embodiment of the inversion of hierarchy that is central to both
transgression and inversion, the buffoon can be said to represent the very
personification of carnival.
Most of the literature on carnival, from Mikhail Bakhtin’s classic study
of Rabelais (Bakhtin 1984) to the work of Stallybrass and White (1986)
on the politics and poetics of transgression, examines carnival as a social
event with groups of people taking on particular functions. The buffoon,
however, succeeds in embodying all that carnival represents, but at the
individual level. While this is not to propose that the buffoon resides in
an isolated, individualistic place without social and political implications,
it does suggest that he exemplifies at the personal level that which carnival
represents at the community level.
When, for example, Stallybrass and White observe the “profoundly
ambivalent,” vulgar, and earthy quality of carnival laughter, “with its oaths
and profanities, its abusive language and its mocking words,” they could
be speaking as much about the buffoon as about a specific social or cultural
event (1986, 8). And when they portray “the ‘coarse’ and familiar speech
of the fair and the marketplace” (8) as humiliating and mortifying as well
as reviving and renewing, they could also be describing the buffoon’s use
of language. The buffoon’s lingua franca, that is, expresses “a complex
vital repertoire of speech patterns excluded from official discourse which
could be used for parody, subversive humour and inversion” (Stallybrass
and White 1986, 8). This description applies equally to the buffoon, who
swears indiscriminately and uses wit both to make people laugh inappro-
priately and to undermine social norms. Stallybrass and White’s imagery
collapses the carnival of the fair with the carnival of the buffoon.
Panurge, in keeping with the spirit of carnival, loves the practical joke,
mean-spirited as some of his tend to be, and his impatience with authority
has him never missing an opportunity to perpetrate a trick “against the
sergeants and the watch” (Rabelais [1532–34] 1955, 222). Falstaff, how-
ever, represents the very embodiment of carnival with his efforts to un-
dermine political and social authority and his unconscious subversion of
the masculine norm. His flight from Master Ford’s house in a basket of
soiled linen that gets tossed into the Thames (London’s cesspool at the
time) equates his role with that of the sewer, on the one hand, and with
women’s work, on the other (Shakespeare [1597] 2000). These trans-
gressive identities resonate with the saturnalian “reversal of values” that,
according to C. L. Barber, represents “a radical challenge to received
ideas” (1959, 198–99).

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 S I G N S Summer 2006 ❙ 1139

Likewise, Rameau’s nephew eschews social authority consistently and

with a vengeance. He challenges the idea that he is the fool when he
points out that “there is only one fool, and that is the chap who treats
us to his hospitality in exchange for such flattering deceptions” (Diderot
[1761] 1966, 78). He makes clear that his integrity forces him to be
honest about his behavior while the other members of society lie about
their exploits and hide behind a shield of social hypocrisy.
Fields, for his part, “appeared on the scene as the embodiment of public
misbehavior, a man not so much at odds with authority as completely
oblivious to it” (Curtis 2003, 4). In his film roles, Fields builds on this
miscreant tendency to undermine the law and social norms. Indeed, as
Curtis points out, “the architecture of the forces for order is toppled at
least once in every picture” (2003, 449).
The buffoon’s transgression, his confrontation with the socially ac-
ceptable, and his rejection of authority, similar to his other misbehavior,
place him at great risk. Perversely, he puts himself in jeopardy out of a
sense of survival; he literally has no choice. As a physically weak man, one
without the respectable attributes of the powerful male, a buffoon remains
vulnerable no matter what he does. He is susceptible to the onslaught of
male hostility whether he speaks or remains silent. Given this dilemma,
many buffoons, in literature and in life, overstep the bounds of ridiculing
other men, of disregarding mores, and of dismissing symbols of patriarchal
privilege, and they are threatened with either being beaten up or killed.9
Thus, the buffoon has to be cautious about being too smart. He has
to temper his sharpness with self-abasement. While he makes a fool of
others, he also has to be a willing butt of his own jokes. He cannot ridicule
too strongly those men who are more powerful than he, and he has to
laugh at himself as a way to disarm others from taking him too seriously
and making him their target.
The buffoon provides a male identity that embraces the cowardly, the
lazy, and the criminal while emphasizing eloquence, craft, and humor.
With his reliance on wit, comedy, and self-deprecation, the buffoon pos-
sesses qualities usually spurned by more manly men who prefer the source
of their bravado to be brawn not brains, self-confidence not self-ridicule.
In his negotiations with hegemonic masculinities, the buffoon provides

9
Silenus, e.g., risks being raped by the Cyclops when his pandering fails him, and Falstaff
is ridiculed by both Prince Hal and Master Ford. Rameau’s nephew suffers rejection at the
very least from his patron when, as Leonard Tancock points out in his introduction to the
satire, his “momentary dropping of the mask has lost him the comfortable position of
sycophant and tame jester to the household” (1966, 15).

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1140 ❙ Murphy

an alternative male gender role by allowing the less athletic, more pusillan-
imous male to remain a man in the eyes of his peers. In his destablilization
of what Butler calls the “regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence”
(1990, 137), the buffoon embodies a male heterosexual incoherence that
provides an excellent example of Butler’s notion of an intelligible gender.
For Butler, “‘Intelligible’ genders are those which in some sense institute
and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender,
sexual practice, and desire. . . . Their persistence and proliferation, however,
provide critical opportunities to expose the limits and regulatory aims of
that domain of intelligibility and, hence, to open up within the very terms
of that matrix of intelligibility rival and subversive matrices of gender
disorder” (17). The buffoon’s parody of the mask of masculinity intro-
duces the possibility of reinhabiting the old in a way that changes it.
Indeed, as a masquerade of masculinity, the buffoon suggests “an insub-
ordinate alterity to the masculine subject [that] expose[s] the necessary
failure of masculinity” (Butler 1990, 48).
Ironically, then, and at times tragically, the buffoon leads a life no less
pathetic or personally destructive than those of many heterosexual men.
Yet he does survive and sometimes even flourishes in a world controlled
by rigid gender demarcations that provide the majority of men with the
illusion that privilege and power lie within their grasp.

Department of English and Philosophy

Murray State University

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