![]() To this, Triboulet cleverly responded: “For Saint Nitouche’s and Saint Pansard’s sake, patrons of insanity, I choose to die from old age.” The king is said to have been so amused by this that he commuted Triboulet’s execution and had him banished from the realm instead. Having already decreed them off limits, Francis I had no choice but to execute the jester-although as a final show of appreciation, he did grant him the right to choose how he died. In the end, however, Triboulet went too far for even the king to put up with by insulting the queen and her courtesans. When the monarch told him not to worry, that he would hang the man fifteen minutes after any such attack, Triboulet said: “Well, couldn’t you hang him fifteen minutes before instead?” On one occasion, he complained to Francis I that a nobleman, hurt by one of his jokes, had threatened to cudgel him to death. With the exceptions of his patron kings, Louis XII and Francis I of France, Triboulet was widely disliked in court and regularly beaten by nobles, pages, and other courtiers. Like many jesters, he was also afflicted with several physical deformities-in this case microcephaly, a hunched back, “short and twisted legs long and hanging arms,” for which he was mercilessly mocked as a monkey or bird. He was known for his sharp mind and quick wit, and for constantly getting into trouble-as well as orchestrating it for others. Triboulet was in many ways the archetypal court jester, immortalized in Victor Hugo’s banned play, Le roi s’amuse, Verdi’s operatic adaptation, Rigoletto, and, each year in his red cap and bells, as the mascot of the Monthey Carnival in Switzerland. The ancient Sumerians and Greeks, as well as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Mark Twain, and others, also appreciated the art form.īut not everyone thought it belonged in polite society, even though Roland sometimes used the more sophisticated, French-sounding name “Roland le Fartere.” When Henry III took the throne in the early 1200s, he confiscated the jester’s land and denounced the fool as “indecent,” banishing him for good from the royal court. He wasn’t the only performance fartist either the braigetoír of 8th-century Ireland were paid in shoulder fat to fart at feasts, while Edo period street freaks like Kirifuri-hanasaki-otoko, the “mist-descending flower-blossom man” or so-called “shogun of sh**-gassers,” performed “modulated flatulent arias” on Tokyo’s Ryogoku Bridge. In return for “a jump, a whistle, and a fart” ( unum saltum et siffletum et unum bumbulum ) each Christmas, Roland was awarded acres of land and a sizeable manor in Suffolk. And this was no doubt important for keeping otherwise near-omnipotent rulers from becoming pompous assholes themselves. In the Middle Ages, it may even have been a form of philosophy-an offhand reminder of our existential finitude, not to mention our feculence and sin. That’s certainly what Roland the Farter, medieval master of the flatulent arts, thought anyway, along with his patron King Henry II of England. Oscar Wilde famously remarked that “sarcasm is the lowest form of wit”-which means farting must be at least one rung up. ![]()
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