The course invokes the comic spirit to take a broadly hermeneutic approach to our human work of “composing a life” (Mary Catherine Bateson). The word “hermeneutics” is derived from the Greek god Hermes – the messenger/link between the gods and the mortals. Hermes was also a trickster!

We will study the historic work of the clown/fool/trickster, learning to to appreciate contraries, welcome alternatives, look askance and anew, and strengthen our funny bones, keeping a humble and hopeful stance. We may reunite with our own trickster archetype, emerging as comic heroes, contributing to a world of imagination and love!

“Comic heroes … are thus exemplars of a special human freedom and flexibility – which, after all, is the real genius of the race. … We are endowed with a brain that – along with the capacity for imagining all sorts of paradises and utopias for ourselves, and an equal number of holocausts and hells for our enemies – is capable of an endless variety of alternative modes of being, believing, and doing. We are not locked into an unvarying set of biologically imprinted behavioral patterns. Instead, we have developed an unending variety of cultural substitute-forms. While these substitute-forms can in turn become as rigid as a biological imprint, and thus violate the very freedom that gave them birth, it has been the task of clowns and fools and comic heroes to remind us of our intrinsic freedom and flexibility.” (Hyers, 1981, p. 122)