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In 1972, a ridiculous comedy called What’s Up, Doc? burst into theaters like a pack of drunken puppies, leaving audiences across the country weak and wheezing from the film’s hilarity. I didn’t see What’s Up, Doc? until the 1980s, after video rentals became a thing, but the movie’s raucously impetuous brand of humor was precisely calibrated to my adolescent sensibilities. I remember gasping for breath during the madcap shenanigans and feeling that my laughter could never catch up to the snowballing dialogue and action. That delightful sensation of helplessness, I now realize, was a gift of the Fool archetype.
When the movie begins, four unrelated travelers are converging on San Francisco, each carrying an identical yet uniquely precious overnight case. One case holds secret government files, one bursts with gems, and one contains lumpen stones belonging to a musicologist named Howard Bannister. Absentminded and distracted but oh-so-handsome, Howard has arrived in town with his tyrannical fiancée, Eunice, to compete for grant money to research how prehistoric peoples played music on rocks. Into this powder keg for mayhem and misunderstanding bursts the radiant but impoverished Judy Maxwell, owner of the fourth overnight case.
Judy promptly sets her romantic sights on Howard, turning the story’s genre from a simple case of mistaken luggage into a true screwball comedy, or a romantic comedy that makes fun of romance. Spies, thieves, millionaires, musicologists—as our zany characters compete to get their hands on files or jewelry or grant money, Judy competes only to get her hands on Howard. With a complete willingness to leap headlong into adventure and perfect indifference to social norms, she offers an illustration of the archetypal Fool.
Not just any fool
At first glance, the Fool and the Trickster might seem like two names for the same archetype, and they do have many similarities. Judy herself has no shortage of Trickster traits: her hungers for food and for Howard drive her actions, she lives on the road, and her linguistic acrobatics leave anyone who blunders into her orbit dazed and reeling. But there’s also an important distinction between the Trickster and the Fool: where the Trickster’s emphasis is on tricking others, or fooling them, the Fool primarily does foolish things. The Fool acts foolishly.
In the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, the Fool card shows a figure about to take what appears to be an extremely foolish step into thin air with no possible means of support. This image captures Judy’s defining characteristic: where others fear to tread, Judy leaps. She leaps into traffic, into Howard’s personal space, into disguises of many kinds. At every opportunity—and for the Fool every moment is an opportunity—Judy runs full steam ahead, never pausing or tapping the brakes. An idling car is for speeding off, a hunk like Howard is to be wooed, a banquet invitation she finds is a clarion call to impersonate the person who was invited, namely the hapless, humorless Eunice.
For a Fool like Judy to take foolish leaps, she cannot care about rules or regulations. She can be daring, audacious, funny, and charming, but cannot be well-behaved. She must possess immunity to anything resembling “nice girl” conditioning. At one point, wig quivering and voice quavering, an indignant Eunice shouts to Judy, “Don’t you know the meaning of propriety?” “Propriety?” Judy replies jauntily as she disappears down an escalator. “Noun. Conformity to established standards of behavior or manners. Suitability, rightness or justice. See ‘etiquette.’”
Judy knows enough about propriety to avoid it. Instead, she claims the freedom to be herself. Joseph Campbell calls this “the will and courage to credit one’s own senses and to honor one’s own decisions, to name one’s own virtues” (Creative Mythology 30), which he sees as the wellspring of creativity. Judy certainly credits her own senses, honors her own decisions, and acts from her own virtues and her own desires. In fact, her willingness to cause trouble enables her to align her actions precisely with her desires. As a result, she can respond creatively to the many challenges she and Howard face. Judy flings propriety aside and lives authentically—fully awake, fully alive, fully herself.
So Judy is a Fool, but three additional traits make her a particular kind of Fool. First, she is invulnerable; neither her feelings nor her person can be hurt. With a spring in her step, she survives every disaster. Second, she glows with conspicuous beauty. In the movie’s sea of horrific hairdos, Judy’s hair shimmers like silk, as does her singing voice. Finally, she knows everything about everything, from geology to music to literature. In other words, she’s omniscient. Invulnerability, sublime beauty, and omniscience all combine to indicate the presence of a deity who is a woman and therefore a goddess—what Campbell might call the “Goddess of Life,” or creative energy (671). Judy is a sacred ray of creative freedom and courage who illuminates how imprisoned everyone else is in custom and conformity.
The gifts of chaos
For everyone in What’s Up, Doc? who isn’t Judy, disaster blooms in the wake of her footsteps. Hotel rooms burst into flame. Brawls break out. Giant plate glass windows smash to smithereens. But Judy’s chaos, being that of a Holy Fool, reveals the chaotic nature of the divine, which doesn’t necessarily mean the “good” or the “proper.” Divine powers such as the Fool’s can burst in unannounced and turn everything upside down. Judy operates at maximum Fool wattage to make the point that Fool energy can shake things up. Sometimes when that happens, what was brittle breaks, and what was resilient grows stronger.
Where most of the characters in this movie see each other only in terms of the contents of their overnight cases, Judy sees what actually matters: she sees Howard. She sees a person and loves what she sees. Neither his literal nor his metaphorical baggage concerns her. What concerns her is coaxing him out of his overly heady approach to music, fixated on the far-distant past, in favor of playing real, embodied music in a very present now.
Divine powers such as the Fool’s can burst in unannounced and turn everything upside down.
Judy’s ability to leap joyfully at every opportunity is only possible because she inhabits the present moment so completely. This drags others into the present with her, if only to cope with the havoc she creates. She turns each moment into the wackiest possible version of itself, regardless of norms or consequences. And in so doing, she wins the day. She gets her guy. The Fool Goddess’s relentlessly foolish and divine spontaneity leads to love.
The helplessness I felt watching What’s Up, Doc? in the 80s is much like the helplessness Howard experiences in Judy’s force field. But helplessness can be a prelude to some sort of surrender. Maybe to laughter and silliness, maybe to music and beauty. Maybe to the divine. Maybe Judy’s invitation is to surrender to a little daring, zest, humor, and audacity, dancing adroitly around convention and leaping into the occasional adventure.
MythBlast authored by:
Joanna Gardner, PhD, is a writer, mythologist, and magical realist focusing on creativity, goddesses, and wonder tales. She is the author of The Practice of Enchantment: MythBlast Essays, 2020-2024 and the lead author of Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide. Joanna serves as director of marketing and communications for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and as adjunct professor in Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Mythological Studies program. She also co-founded and co-leads the Fates and Graces, hosting webinars and workshops for mythic readers and writers. For Joanna's updates and additional publications, you are most cordially invited to visit her website at joannagardner.com.
This MythBlast was inspired by Creative Mythology and the archetype of The Fool.
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This Week's Highlights
"Not only in the sciences but in every department of life the will and courage to credit one’s own senses and to honor one’s own decisions, to name one’s own virtues and to claim one’s own vision of truth, have been the generative forces of the new age, the enzymes of the fermentation of the wine of this great modern harvest — which is a wine, however, that can be safely drunk only by those with a courage of their own."
-- Joseph Campbell