In the biography A Pleasant History of the Life and Death of Will Summers (1637), we encounter an episode involving the court jester Will Sommers (died 1560), Cardinal Wolsey (1473–1530), and King Henry VIII (1491–1547). The three are engaged in a game of rhymes when Wolsey tries to slight the jester with the lines ‘A Rod in the School / And a whip for a Fool, / Is always in season’; to which Sommers retorts, ‘A halter and a rope, / For him that would be pope / Against all right and reason’1 — much to the king’s amusement.Some 50 years later, the actor and playwright Robert Armin (1568–1615) gained prominence as Shakespeare’s most important fool actor. Following Armin’s employment by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1600 (the theatre company for which Shakespeare wrote), Shakespeare’s depiction of fools, including Feste in Twelfth Night (written 1602) and Lear’s Fool from King Lear (1605), adapted to align more with Armin’s performances and writings on the archetype.2 Armin himself was inspired by Will Sommers, writing extensively about him in his anthology of fools and jesters, Foole upon Foole (1600)3. His performances too would have been influenced by his research into the fools of his generation — allowing us to conjecture that Shakespeare’s memorable theatrical fools are drawn from authentic real-life fools of Elizabethan England.The royal court of Tudor England was characterised by a rigid class system. Within this, the fool held the lowest position — Sommers, for instance, is said to have slept ‘amongst the Spaniels’4; yet (as evidenced from the anecdote above) he clearly had the licence to insult those of a much higher social status.We gain an insight into how this is possible through the noblewoman Olivia’s line in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: ‘There is no slander in an allowed / fool, though he do nothing but rail’5. In other words, the fool’s words carry no weight so that even at their most severe they have no effect. (The word fool itself derives from the Latin ‘follis’, meaning bellows, as a fool speaks nothing but inconsequential air.)In King Lear, Lear’s Fool positions himself relative to the king with the line ‘Marry, here’s grace and a codpiece: that’s a wise man / and a fool.6’ The codpiece, worn around the crotch, was a feature of the costume of the nobility of the time. Here the fool refers to those who think with their crotch and their foolish vanity, as Lear’s Fool mentions in his previous line, ‘The codpiece that will house / before the head has any’7. These lines could be interpreted with a touch of irony.Thus, as depicted in the anecdote illustrating Sommers’s defiance of Cardinal Wolsey, we see a trait of the fool that will come to define his literary incarnations: social inversion. Shakespeare’s fools defy the social hierarchy by exploiting the very rules that enforce the class divide, paradoxically proving the power of those rules by breaking them. In doing so, Shakespeare’s fools reveal the contemporaneous importance of those systems — the importance of class to Shakespeare’s time. The fool in Tudor England, therefore, achieves success and notoriety by inverting the lowliness of their station and rising to the pinnacle of society through the exercise of wit. As Feste remarks in Twelfth Night, ‘Better a witty fool than a foolish / wit.8’Four-hundred years later, in the film The Naked Gun 2 ½: The Smell of Fear (1991), the modern fool Frank Drebin is commended as a ‘most distinguished American’ for his ‘1000th drug dealer killed’. Drebin is a detective and soon reveals that the last two were bystanders he backed over with his car, who just happened to be drug dealers. Drebin’s incompetence works out in his favour. This is similarly the case for Jacques Clouseau, the protagonist of The Pink Panther film series. Clouseau rises to the rank of Chief Inspector in The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), having solved all of his cases by complete accident. In A Shot in the Dark (1964), Clouseau defends the prime suspect, Maria, basing his conclusions on her looks rather than an investigation, despite the mounting evidence against her. Bizarrely he is proven right, accidentally triumphing very much like Drebin.Derek Zoolander is another modern fool and in the film Zoolander (2001), which satirises the fashion industry, Derek rises to its upper echelons becoming the world’s top male model despite a blatant lack of basic competence. Ben Stiller’s absurd performance makes it clear that Zoolander is blissfully unaware of his own idiocy, highlighting the stark contrast between his international acclaim and his cognitive limitations.Here we see the defining trait of the modern fool: they are successful idiots, whose incompetence paradoxically aids in their achievement. The modern fool, then, functions in a meritocratic society, one that values achievement, and the fool creates comedy by inverting that system. Very much like the Shakespearean fool in the Tudor court, the modern fool reveals that where society was once stratified by class, it is now stratified by perceived competence and occupational success. If the fool is the exception to the societal rule, then our societal rule is merit. It is fitting that this compelling insight into society is provided by a character archetype that is often perceived as inconsequential. The archetype remains ever relevant — Sommers and Armin are remembered today, 400 years after their death; the actors who portrayed Drebin and Clouseau, Leslie Nielsen and Peter Sellers, are remembered as legendary comedic actors. As long as there is a system of social stratification, the fool will make an appearance to make a mockery of it.