Here is where we get to the heart of the matter. On the surface, the jester is undermining the powers that be by means of his act. His loose tongue knows no bounds. His biting wit is cutting, his humor unforgiving. He says things to the king that the servants would be afraid to think, let alone speak. Yet it is the king who hires him. What does that tell us? If the king is the one who allows the jester to speak, that means that the king is so powerful (and so secure in his power) that he can afford to be publicly criticized and made fun of. The jester’s act — however transgressive it may look, however much it may seem to challenge the king’s power — is actually an expression of that power. The king looks condescendingly on the jester from his privileged position because he knows the jester cannot touch him. If anything, the jester solidifies the king’s power by working for the king as a sort of pressure valve. The king wants some of the discontent of the people to be expressed openly, releasing built-up tension and ensuring that said discontent will not burst in actions that could really undermine his position. The jester is his means of doing that. So, His Majesty allows himself to be ridiculed, challenged, and even humiliated before the subjects. This is by design (even when done unconsciously). The king laughs all the while: the laughter of those who can laugh at themselves without losing one bit of their power, that laughter that is nothing but an expression of said power. When we, the public, laugh at the king, our laughter is also an expression of his power. He wants us to laugh so as not to act. It is, then, his laughter grafted onto our faces. When we laugh at the king, it is actually the king laughing at us.

None of this is to say, of course, that the jester is consciously complicit in the machinations of the king — sometimes not even the monarch himself is so complicitous. From the point of view of the jester, he is in fact undermining certain power structures by means of his humor (and indeed he is — at least locally, if we narrow our perspective enough). Sure, he knows that what he says is taken in jest, but at bottom there is something of the activist in him. The truth he speaks is meant to penetrate a morally dubious power structure insidiously and make it gradually more porous, more likely to collapse. But the fact that his activity is taken all in good fun only shows that the power structure can take it, that it is happy to take it, that it submits itself to the jester’s shenanigans voluntarily.

The jester is noble in his pursuit, but his target always has a leg up on him. That is what happened at the Golden Globes: Ricky Gervais gave Hollywood his middle finger, but Hollywood co-opted his act for its purposes — after all, it was using his abuse of itself in order to make money, to get high ratings, to let plebeians like you and me have their little moment of vengeance on these self-indulgent, self-congratulatory award shows (a good strategy for getting us to watch what we claim to despise). King Hollywood incorporated all of Ricky Gervais’ critical moves in a higher structure, in almost Hegelian fashion: what appeared to be a negation of Hollywood values and practices was made into an affirmation of them. And King Hollywood was laughing all the while, as kings do. Ricky Gervais was a superb jester (he always is), but he failed (not that he was consciously trying) to make the leap into philosophy. Why? Because Hollywood laughed, because he was funny.

But what happens when the jester actually threatens the established power, when this power is fragile enough that the jester’s witticisms touch it to the quick, when the jester is taken seriously? Socrates happens. The hemlock happens. The philosopher is the jester who does not produce laughter.

In the earth-shattering clash between Socrates and Athens, we have nothing but a jester whose critique stopped being funny to the audience it was aimed at. Athens humored Socrates at first, but that jester kept pushing it. He became more and more relentless. Athens tried to take it all in stride. They smiled at that odd man for years. It was so easy to laugh him off in the good old days, as he was laughed off by generals, sophists, and other luminaries. But there is a limit to everything — even humor. As Athens’ smile started to wane from its face, Socrates’ child-like investigations began to be considered more and more like a moral crusade. By the time of the trial, Athens saw his activity in a new light: he was rubbing the citizens’ nose in their own filth, exposing their arrogant ineptitude, their self-satisfied vices — to the point of compromising the morale of an already demoralized (having recently lost a drawn-out war) people.

However powerful Athens was compared to most other Greek city-states, it was still a fragile community with a host of existential challenges: a war, a plague, faction, corruption, moral and religious decadence, etc. So, the clever gadfly who simply wanted to rouse that noble and sluggish horse of a city back into life with his lighthearted, light-footed, light-producing pricks was properly, from the point of view of the horse, swatted. And that is the jester who becomes a philosopher. The audience is responsible for the transition, not he. It happens the minute they grow serious. There is true danger when laughter stops. (This should give Ricky Gervais some pause, for his last appearance was taken considerably more seriously than the previous ones, as evidenced by the uncomfortable expressions in the crowd and the editorials objecting to his monologue.)

So, what does this analysis mean for those of us who practice philosophy? It means that we must be always vigilant, always on the lookout, always careful that we do not become jesters in spite of ourselves. Look at the current modes of philosophical practice: from being a philosophy professor to being a political commentator, cultural critic, writer, think-tank hireling, or what have you. They are all susceptible to “producing laughter,” to being humored by a condescending audience that ultimately has nothing to fear from them. But philosophy always involves some risk. The philosopher’s reflection is done in the face of danger, before an audience that is hit with the full force of the thought and is, therefore, unable to laugh it off. As practitioners of this ancient pursuit, we must remember that. We must jest in seriousness and not philosophize in jest (as we often do), for the jester who is taken seriously is a philosopher, just as the philosopher who is humored is a jester.