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THE DELIGHT MAKERS 2 9
and though the bishops generally took little part in it, the common priests were its chief participants, the most delighted of the delight-makers. The end of the seventeenth century saw the end of it as a deliberate part of the annual ritual of Christendom, but it survived in odd places— Mardi Gras in New Orleans is a happy marriage between the ancient Roman processional triumph and the Feast of Fools of the Middle Ages, and if we would imagine the mediaeval feast, it is simple enough: we only have to imagine a wilder, a more roisterous Mardi Gras.
All over the world religions have sanctified folly, but it was always a special kind of folly. There must be mockery in it, but the mockery must do no harm. There must be obscenity, but the obscenity is reserved for a single day or a single occasion: a licensed release from pent-up emotions. Somewhere there must be a clown in command, a dominus festij to ring the sacred bells and call upon the faithful to rejoice. There must be a deliberate reversal of the conventions: the high are laid low, the humble are elevated. There must be free wine flowing, and wreaths of roses on the foreheads of the celebrants, and every man may address every woman, and every child must straddle a father's shoulders. Someone must play music, and everyone must dance in the village squares. The koshare and the mediaeval priests at the Feast of Fools were performing the same human function; and in our own day this function has been performed by Chaplin and W. C. Fields and perhaps three others.
Today, the glinting wisecrack has taken the place of the salty humor of the past. In the modern radio auditorium you find the cruellest of recent inventions— the man who raises his arm and tells you when to laugh. "How are you?" says Groucho Marx. "So you come from Wichita Falls? Well, well. Fell in the falls, eh!" The bright mechanical laughter follows immediately, and ceases when the hand falls. The manipulated radio audience and the manipulated tape are putting an end to laughter, and encouraging us to become a race of