Comedians are not Bards
Netflix specials be damned...
In my previous article detailing a tour of a data centre and whether such an environment could engender new folklore, I made a rather catty aside about right-wing comedians describing themselves as the philosopher-bards of the modern world. In this essay, I wish to expand on that, resist the urge to make further sardonic comments, and break down, from the perspective of someone studying stories and storytelling, exactly why I find the self-mythologising of comedians as punk court jesters, speaking truth to power, to be inaccurate and a conflation of terms.
Before proceeding with an overly pedantic essay rebutting something said offhandedly by just a few comedians in interviews, I should clarify that I like stand-up. Several comedians have had profound influences on my writing, my thinking, and my understanding of how language can be wielded. I believe stand-up comedy is a sophisticated and vital art form. This essay is not an attack on comedy itself but a defence of accurate terminology. Accurate terminology being that which separates us from the beasts.
That said, we should be vigilant in resisting the self-mythology of others, not simply because it is deeply cringe, but because self-mythology is the worst kind of mythology (even worse than the swan-based antics of the Greek corpus).
First, we must recognise that the environment of telling alters the story being told, influencing the narrative and how an audience perceives the story. There is more scholarship I could dive into here, as this idea has deep implications for folklore in particular, but this essay is already long enough without a tangent into psychogeography.
Comedy occurs in particular places, chiefly beneath a proscenium. Literal or figurative, prosceniums are powerful things. They establish irony, artifice and dramatic framing. The audience enters into an agreement that anything taking place beneath one is not ‘true’ in the literal sense. A fireplace, hearth, or, as was often the case with the Cornish droll tellers that are my area of study, a doorstep, are substantively different environments with differing assumptions. Bardic storytelling was embedded in daily life, in ritual, in seasonal gatherings. It wasn’t ticketed entertainment cordoned off from the rest of existence. It was cultural infrastructure.
Second, a comedian’s material is proprietary. Joke theft is a serious accusation in comedy circles, rightly seen as both an artistic and ethical violation. Intellectual property matters, and comedians guard their material accordingly, despite the prevalence of the same three jokes at the expense of trans people that many comedians seem to share freely. Folk stories, by contrast, are communal and authorless. Merrymaids, giants, and changelings belong to everyone. The story is the community’s property, refined, codified and iterated through retellings. (I should note comedy does occasionally develop more communally. The tradition of working men’s clubs in the 60s and 70s featured jokes as shared property; it’s just a shame they were all either about mothers-in-law or deeply racist.)
Thirdly, and perhaps the most ‘I have studied creative writing’ point: jokes are not stories. Or rather, jokes fall into their own category of narrative form, what André Jolles in his theory of Einfache Formen (Simple Forms) would classify as distinct from myth, legend, or tale. Jolles argued that different narrative types possess their own internal logics, structural requirements, and relationships to truth and meaning.
Expanding on this distinction, Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Storyteller’ helps us understand what separates stories from jokes. For Benjamin, the storyteller, ‘takes what he tells from experience: his own or that reported by others. And he, in turn, makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale.’ The story carries practical wisdom that persists beyond the moment of telling. Its ending is not a punchline but an opening, an invitation to reflect, integrate, and carry forward.
The difference lies in how each form handles meaning. Benjamin writes, ‘It is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation... The most extraordinary things, marvellous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the events is not forced on the reader.’
A joke forces interpretation upon you. That’s precisely how punchlines work. It tells you where the meaning lies, what the twist is, and how to understand everything that came before. A story, particularly a folk tale or myth, refuses this closure. The giant in the tale might represent nature’s power, colonising forces, patriarchal authority, or simply a giant.
Certain comedians do employ the rhythms and modes of storytelling as part of their comedic toolkit. Just as some stories use humour, some jokes use story. Billy Connolly, for example, demonstrates how storytelling techniques can enhance comedy. His extended narratives, meanderings through memory and observation, and his ability to make the journey as entertaining as the destination all draw on oral storytelling traditions. But these are affects, deliberate performance choices deployed alongside timing, misdirection, and juxtaposition.
Just as folklore literature began as transcribed orality, there is no genre of literature of transcribed stand-up routines. (Sorry, Stewart Lee) The joke, brilliant as it might be in performance, doesn’t accumulate meaning across generations because it isn’t designed to.
Mythographers, folklorists, and orality scholars don’t study Jimmy Carr Netflix specials because they’re not the same kind of cultural object. Community-based oral traditions and a Joe Rogan special are not equivalent replacements. This isn’t a value judgement about quality (honest, it’s not). But they are different narrative forms serving different functions.
Comedians Are Not Fools
I must now address a second claim made by comedians if you make the mistake of asking them about their craft in a podcast setting, that modern stand-up comedians occupy the archetype of the Fool.
I do understand the appeal of thinking of oneself as a truth-teller, the jester speaking uncomfortable realities to structures of power, the only person brave/smart/cool/punk enough to say what everyone else is thinking. Letting the emperor know they might be a little under-dressed.
But like the conflation of comedian and bard, this comparison collapses under scrutiny. The Fool is not solely ‘someone who makes jokes about powerful people.’ The archetype has specific historical conditions, social functions, and specific vulnerabilities that modern arena comedians simply do not share. While certain historical figures in stand-up, Lenny Bruce facing obscenity charges, Bill Hicks railing against censorship and corporate power, and George Carlin getting arrested for his ‘Seven Dirty Words’ routine, did embody something closer to the Fool. The contemporary landscape of streaming specials, panel shows, and arena tours, however, has moved away from this archetype.
The court fool, or jester, emerged as a distinct professional role in mediaeval European courts, with figures like Will Sommers (jester to Henry VIII) and Triboulet (jester to Louis XII and Francis I of France) becoming famous for speaking uncomfortable truths to volatile monarchs and living to put their belled shoes on again.
Polish theatre critic and massive Stalinist Jan Kott’s seminal work Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964) provides an incisive analysis of the Fool archetype, particularly through his examination of King Lear’s Fool. Kott argues that the Fool represents ‘the philosophy of the absolute’ in Shakespeare’s tragic universe: a character who sees through the pretensions of power and speaks the truth that everyone else is too invested in the social order to acknowledge.
For Kott, the Fool is not merely comic relief but a philosophical necessity. He observes that the Fool ‘does not follow any ideology’ and ‘is generally sceptical about any social order’. The Fool’s comedy stems from his ability to perceive and articulate the fundamental absurdity of human pretensions to power, dignity, and meaning. The Fool tells Lear he is nothing (literally nothing) once he has given away his kingdom, because the Fool recognises that kingship is a social fiction that evaporates the moment its material basis disappears.
Critically, Kott notes that the Fool’s truth-telling is only possible because of his marginal status. He is simultaneously indispensable and disposable, valued and dismissed. This liminality grants him his licence. As Kott writes, the Fool ‘can be hanged, but until he is hanged, he can tell the truth’. The threat of violence is always present, which makes the Fool’s position genuinely precarious, not just performative. The Fool’s ambiguous social status enabled them to cross social boundaries that others could not, serving as a pressure valve that allowed critique to be voiced without threatening the fundamental legitimacy of the power structure.
Modern arena comedians bear almost no resemblance to this archetype. They are not marginal figures risking execution for truth-telling. They are multimillionaires with production deals and merchandise. They are themselves the powerful, wielding massive platforms and cultural influence. The contemporary comedian who positions himself (sorry, fellow bros, it is always him) as a transgressive truth-teller while earning tens of millions from Netflix specials and appearance fees from journalist-murdering governments is not the Fool. But they are foolish, particularly those comedians who frame themselves as counter-cultural rebels while espousing views that align perfectly with dominant right-wing orthodoxy.
As a folklorist with my stabilisers still on, I believe we need to defend the category of storyteller and the various distinctions between Bard, Fool, Griot, Minstrel, and Satirist. These are not just taxonomies for stuffy academics but professions that had (and in some cases still have) real power and real functions within their communities.
It is also important to say that stand-up comedy is a legitimate art form with its own history, techniques, and cultural value. But it is not bardic storytelling, and comedians are not fools. They are comedians, and that should be enough.
If we lose terms to a self-mythologising few, we cede the power they hold to bad actors (not an intended joke about comedians thinking they can act) and lose the ability to articulate what made these roles distinct, powerful, and necessary. We lose the vocabulary to describe what we’ve lost, and without that vocabulary, we cannot hope to recover or reinvent these practices.