Clowns, religious

Persons who dress and act humorously in religious activities. In some Native American cultures a solemn RITUAL by the priests will be followed by a burlesque (or comic) repetition of the same by ritual clowns making fun of it. Their performance may be related to the folklore role of the TRICKSTER, such as Coyote, who is clever enough to break rules and fool the gods in all sorts of ways. In medieval Europe some festivals, especially those of CARNIVAL or the season just before the fast of LENT, would install a "boy bishop" selected from among the choirboys who would ridicule the functions of a church leader in parodies that went to the extent of fake masses that substituted obscene songs for litanies and burned old shoes instead of incense. At the Jewish PURIM, solemn rabbis may be mockingly imitated by comedians or children. In the Roman Saturnalia, held at the same time as modern CHRISTMAS and NEW YEAR FESTIVALS, roles would also be reversed as masters waited on slaves, for a major feature of religious clowns is the way they and their antics upset the usual social order and the expected way of doing things. Religious and other clowns particularly appear in boundary times and situations, such as festivals that appear at the winter solstice, like Saturnalia or New Year's, or like Carnival around the beginning of spring, and among groups like choirboys or students or marginalized clans in some Native American tribes that are ambiguously situated between priests and laypeople. They often dress in costumes that combine stripes or dots of wildly contrasting color, and are baggy and ill-fi tting. All this gives clues to the meaning of clowns. They are meant to provide comic relief at solemn occasions, and simply to entertain. More than that, though, they also show something important about the sacred cosmos: It includes all opposites, high and low, funny and serious, that which fi ts and that which doesn't fi t. It is bigger than the neat categories of the human mind, and so it has to bring in those things that show up the pretensions and limitations of the mind. Humor is very religious when it shows that we humans are not as great or as perfect as we like to think we are, and religious clowns make that clear.