MeMoMu_MC_012 THE TOWN FOOL _ JOACHIM FOIKIS / MUSJÖÖ LIBLIKAS
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Town Fool - Joachim Foikis (1968)
2,326 views / 25.02.2026,13:13
Jun 21, 2018
On April 1, 1968, Vancouver's Joachim Foikis aka "The Town Fool" received a Canada Council grant for $3,500 for "a serious contribution to the self-awareness of the entire community." He is featured here in a CBUT (CBC Vancouver) news interview clip.
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In 1968, someone at the Canada Council for the Arts read a funding application, took it to committee, and approved $3,500 of federal money for a 35-year-old German immigrant to dress as a medieval jester and roam the streets of Vancouver mocking society. The grant was announced on April 1. The official justification, recorded in the council's own language, described the project as "a serious contribution to the self-awareness of the entire community." Somewhere in a federal building, a bureaucrat had written those words with a straight face, and enough of their colleagues had agreed to sign off on it, that the money was released.
The Canada Council had just funded a professional fool.Joachim Foikis was not the obvious candidate for a government grant. A German immigrant who had spent his childhood in Berlin during the Nazi years, he held degrees in economics from the University of Berlin, literature from UBC, and had been partway through training as a librarian when, in early 1967, he simply stopped. He told his wife, they drove into town to buy fabric for a costume, and he became the Town Fool. For a year before the grant came through he had been doing it for nothing, appearing in his red and blue jester's outfit at public meetings, courthouse squares, university campuses, and city intersections, declaring that his mission was to mock the four pillars of modern society: money, status, respectability, and conformity.
He drove a donkey cart down Cambie Street during rush hour to make a point about pollution. He was arrested twice for disturbing the peace. When local activists offered to make him mayor of an alternative city government, he turned it down. "No fool," he explained, "would accept the job of mayor of Vancouver." The Canada Council's $3,500, equivalent to roughly $26,000 today, made him the only publicly funded practitioner of professional ridicule in the Western world.The reaction was immediate and split almost perfectly along the lines Foikis had been satirising all along.
The Vancouver Sun ran an editorial defending the grant on the grounds that the fool's function in society was not entertainment but illumination, holding a mirror up to the institutions people had stopped questioning. Vancouver's mayor, the cartoonishly conservative Tom Campbell, was not convinced. He pointed out, loudly, that elderly pensioners received $1,200 a year for a lifetime of work while the federal government had just handed $3,500 to a man who refused employment on principle. Foikis replied by quoting William Blake: "Thou call'st me madman, but I call thee blockhead." A lawyer named Peter deVooght applied for a court writ to prevent the council from releasing the grant at all. He was unsuccessful.
The fool was officially in business.The tradition Foikis was reviving had serious roots. Medieval court jesters were not simply entertainers. They were the only figures in a royal court who held a licensed right to criticise the king without consequence, using humour as the vehicle precisely because it gave the powerful a face-saving way to hear things they would otherwise punish someone for saying. The role had survived from the courts of ancient China and Egypt through to Elizabethan England, and it had always rested on the same logic: that a society which cannot laugh at itself is a society that has lost the ability to see itself clearly.
What the Canada Council effectively argued, in approving that grant, was that this function was still necessary and that in 1968 Vancouver, no existing institution was performing it. They were probably right. Foikis spent the last $500 of his grant on a day-long happening in the Downtown Eastside, buying toys and musical instruments for around 200 of the city's homeless residents. He stopped wearing the costume in 1970, telling friends the spirit had simply left him on a flight to Europe. He died in Victoria in 2007, at 72, dancing on rocks above the harbour when he lost his footing. The jester, at the end, still performing.
Photo by: Ted Dinsmore Kuva vähem
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