Tricksters and fools are among the most popular characters in the narrative traditions of many cultures. People enjoy stories in which the hero, who seems powerless in the face of some superior force, wins out through intelligence or daring. When Roadrunner outsmarts Wiley Coyote, or Tweety escapes the hungry clutches of the "Puddy Tat," we cheer the victor. And we like to laugh at stories of fools. The animated heroes of popular culture have folkloric ancestors in oral tales from around the world: the native American Coyote and Rabbit, the West African Anansi the Spider, the Afro-American Brer Rabbit.
Perhaps we enjoy the stories because we recognize ourselves in their heroes--whether they play the cunning trickster or the consummate fool. Indeed, the same character often alternates between the roles, playing smart in one tale and idiotic in the next. Thus, like all of us who are sometimes successful, sometimes not, in coping with the challenges of life, these story heroes are less tricksters or fools than trickster-fools. Any one tale may show the hero in either guise, but taken as a set, the tales give us a more rounded human being who--like all of us--combines capability with foible.
Tricksters and fools in Middle Eastern tradition
Throughout the Middle East, narrative cycles--sets of stories centered on a constant theme or hero--featuring trickster-fools have long been popular. Indeed, Hasan El-Shamy notes that many of the characters and their actions have ancient origins. Seth, an ancient Egyptian deity, was essentially a divine trickster, and some of the animals associated with Seth--including the jackal, the hyena, and the donkey--still appear in various traditions as anthropomorphic animal tricksters, sometimes with supernatural abilities. While the true animal trickster is virtually absent from modern Middle Eastern folklore, the human trickster-fool remains alive and well. El-Shamy suggests that, based on the distribution of animal and human tricksters in Africa and the Middle East, we can assume that the trickster and his exploits are indigenous and have ancient Middle Eastern origins, and that where animal tricksters have disappeared, their names have simply been replaced by the local names of human trickster-fools.
Localization is a common phenomenon in folklore. By this process, a tale, legend, or other item whose basic form is known over a vast geographical and cultural range, becomes localized to a specific place; thus when, for example, a legend "migrates" from one place to another, its import is made more immediate by changing unfamiliar names to more recognizable local names. Many religious traditions, for instance, have legends claiming that a site was chosen when a revered person's mount, unguided by human hands, stopped at a particular place. That simple story--what folklorists call a "tale type"--explains in its many localized forms, or variants, the origins of mosques, Sufi shrines, Christian churches and monasteries, and so on, attributing the divinely inspired choice of locale to camels, donkeys and horses. So with the trickster-fool tales of the Middle East, although the same plot may be found from Morocco to Afghanistan and perhaps beyond, the hero goes by different names in different parts of the region: Juha, Abu Nawwas, Mullah Nasruddin, Nasruddin Hodja.
In the Arab countries, the trickster-fool is known most commonly as Juha (Goha in the Egyptian dialect) or Abu
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