Trickster
In mythology and the study of folklore and religion, a trickster is a character in a story (god, goddess, spirit, human or anthropomorphisation) who exhibits a great degree of intellect or secret knowledge and uses it to play tricks or otherwise disobey normal rules and defy conventional behavior.
For other uses, see Trickster (disambiguation).Trickster or clown[edit]
The trickster is a term used for a non-performing "trick maker"; they may have many motives behind their intention but those motives are not largely in public view. They are internal to the character or person.
The clown on the other hand is a persona of a performer who intentionally displays their actions in public for an audience.
In literature and popular culture[edit]
In modern literature, the trickster survives as a character archetype, not necessarily supernatural or divine, sometimes no more than a stock character.
Often, the trickster is distinct in a story by their acting as a sort of catalyst; their antics are the cause of other characters' discomfiture, but they are left untouched. Shakespeare's Puck is an example of this.
Another once-famous example was the character Froggy the Gremlin on the early USA children's television show "Andy's Gang". A cigar-puffing puppet, Froggy induced the adult humans around him to engage in ridiculous and self-destructive hi-jinks.[12]
For example, many European fairy tales have a king who wants to find the best groom for his daughter by ordering several trials. No brave and valiant prince or knight manages to win them, until a poor and simple peasant comes. With the help of his wits and cleverness, instead of fighting, they evade or fool monsters, villains and dangers in unorthodox ways. Against expectations, the most unlikely candidate passes the trials and receives the reward.
More modern and obvious examples of the same type include Bugs Bunny in the USA and from Sweden the female hero in the Pippi Longstocking stories.
In Internet and multimedia studies[edit]
In online environments, there has been a link between the trickster and Internet trolling. Some have said that a trickster is a type of online community character.[13][14]
Anthropologist James Cuffe has called the Chinese internet character Grass Mud Horse (cǎonímǎ 草泥马) a trickster candidate because of its duplicity in meaning.[15] Cuffe argues the Grass Mud Horse serves to highlight the creative potential of the trickster archetype in communicating experiential understanding through symbolic narrative. The Grass Mud Horse relies on the interpretative capacity of storytelling in order to skirt internet censorship while simultaneously commenting on the experience of censorship in China. In this sense Cuffe proposes the Grass Mud Horse trickster as 'a heuristic cultural function to aid the perceiver to re-evaluate their own experiential understanding against that of their communities. By framing itself against and in spite of limits the trickster offers new coordinates by which one can reassess and judges one's own experiences.'[15]