Superman /Safety Crossing

Research Readings Supporting Superman/Safety Crossing

My reflections on the readings that supported the Superman/Safety Crossing performance begin with Beatrice Otto’s book, Fools are Everywhere. Initially, the role of the jester was to entertain royalty. The fool, or jester, found favor with the king or queen through humor. Accounting logs show which jesters were awarded the most gifts. Both the terms jester and fool are interchangeable for the royal subject that holds this social position of court entertainer. For the most part, the jester was a nomad who was always struggling to maintain a place and a role in his community. Otto states that:
Apart from providing a balance to the royal hubris, the primary function of the court jester is to provide comic relief from the everyday stresses inherent to the throne. Max Gluckman reminds us that the jester for Queen Elizabeth 'did her more good than the medicines of all her physicians, and the sermons of her chaplains' 8
Humor allowed the fool to be the messenger of bad news to the king. The jester was always seeking favor from the king in order to maintain a position in the court. William Somers was a favorite jester of King Henry VIII. He is believed to have had the most stable position in the history of the court. William was a natural; he humored his way into the heart of the king. Reading this book helped me project the figure of Superman into that peculiar space. “The grotesque jester,” according to William Willeford in his book, The Fool and His Scepter, “is like other kinds of fools, is a mascot who maintains a relationship between the ordered world and the chaos excluded by it.”
The modern-day jester finds his own court in the open terrain of the public using their presence to speak out on issues of injustice, to define or to redirect socially isolated environments, and to sustain humor in the idealized culture of America. The figure of Superman within this given context helped make fun of the situation and people were able to project their notions of the famed character onto me.

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Tags: art, caveney, larry, public, superman
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