Most of us are familier with the roly-poly or pop back up man, These clowns faced toys with rounded bottoms that acted as a kind of preschoolers punching bag.it didn't matter how often he was hit, or how hard it never quite knocked him down because he would pop back up. I powerful blow would cause his springing action to overcompensate but that didn't matter because with infinate patients he would wobble back and forth until he regained his posture, another blow would only delay not hinder his eventual  success. The roly-poly seems to possess a strength as powerful as it is unguided, a stability founded on unstability an invunerability inseperate from his submissiveness to the forces that are willing to act on him.
     Slapstick is one of the oldest parts of foolery, It contains two of the six portions of comedy, falls and blows. The study of it relates greatly to both how foolery is related to magic and why we laugh at all. Have you ever played peak-a-boo with an infant? Sticking your head up from behind a chair? At first the baby pauses in hesitation, thiers just a little bit of apprehension and then recognition, at which point the baby laughs. It's like when Larry bends down to pick something up just as the ladder Curly is carrying swipes past, we laugh not because he has been hit but because he has just so narrowly avoided being hit. In part we laugh because it releave tension and so clowns often create a great deal of tension that is greater than the climax it is destined to reach. The Climax is cheated either by Larry suddenly ducking, or by the clown exagerating the effects of the blow to the point where it becomes unreal (like the character grabbing his foot and hopping around hollering, he's dispelling the im
age that he is creating by exagerating it too much to be real.) We laugh at slapstick not out of cruelty, but quite often out of sympathy, we care about the clown and are releaved that he is not as hurts as he seems.
      We are raised in a way that we appreciate order and are a little affraid of things falling apart. Our ancestors where a little bit more honest with themselves that in the end man didn't control everything to such a degree that he could always  or hardly ever maintain a ordered world to live in. Chaos was to be acknowledged even if we tended to fear it. The clown was a victim of choas, a willing victim, like the roly-poly a victim with no resistance to any forces ready to act opon him. The fool embraced chaos for the sake of and at times in the place of the society, and part of the relief of comedy was that
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                                                      FOOL