Bouncy Normo was a model clown. He told no illicit jokes, he kept his bed space scrupulously clean, and he would certainly have made friends if anyone had been able to stop laughing long enough to talk to him.
In his memory, the library of clowning, with its unrivalled collection of books on jokes, japes and routine, was renamed after him and a statue of Bouncy Normo was erected over his door. To honour the memory of a true clown’s clown, all the library steps were replaced by trampolines. Visitors should not miss the library during revision period, but should wear protective clothing.
AN OUTLINE OF FOOLERY
The Guild uses the term ‘fool’ to apply to all members, even though their chosen field may be clowning or juggling. Newcomers to the Guild, of any age, are expected to work alongside more experienced Fools and will then progress, provided they are not foolish, through the various early grades of Muggins, Gull, Dupe and Butt within the first few years. It takes about five years to become a Fool, but it is then that the enthusiastic student will realise, even as his trousers fill with the official whitewash, that he is but setting foot on the very bottom rung of Foolishness. The senior ranks of Tomfool, Stupid Fool and Arch Fool beckon, and in the fullness of time he may even strive to become a Complete Fool.
The Guild does not admit women. It has been proved that women have no sense of humour whatsoever.
A HISTORY OF THE FOOLS’ GUILD
It was in fact Monsieur Jean-Paul Pune who founded the Guild in 1567, when he came to Ankh-Morpork from Quirm in search of people with a better sense of humour who didn’t keep trying to drown him. It is quite probable that, before he gave his name to the classic ‘play on words’, people had already made crude, rural attempts in that direction, but Pune was the first to explore and codify the ‘pun’ in his work Essay on a Form of Wit, in which he spent 160,000 words defining the Five Great classes and seventy-three subclasses of pun. Pune was the first man to perfect the art of pronouncing brackets, an invaluable aid to the punster faced with an audience lacking in intellect, as in ‘Q. When is a door not a door? A. When it is ajar (a jar)’, one of his early puns for which he was tarred and feathered and left for dead.
There was already an ancient tradition on Foolery, of course. The first fools, according to earliest historical records, were actually skilled warriors who rode alongside the king and fought bravely and Foolishly, hacking their way through the melee with comments like ‘Aha, you need to get ahead (a head)!’ and so on. They were also confidants and advisers, whose role was tell the king things that he really needed to know, such as the fact that he ought to be taking more baths at this time or year and perhaps he should adjust his chain mail.12
Ankh-Morpork already had fools, too. The King had a fool, Will Centunculus, a man recognised throughout the city as someone to avoid. Most city nobles also had fools, imported from Quirm Societe Joyeux, La Sorbumme (another slightly more sophisticated offering from M. Pune) and in fact there was already a loose association of fools extending throughout the Sto Plains and along the Ramtops.
M. Pune was a wealthy man. He felt that humour needed to be taken very seriously and he chose for his new school the recently vacated monastery (as already mentioned) which did not seem to be attracting new occupants despite being such a prime site.
The ASSASSINS’ GUILD next door had just acquired its Guild status. He immediately saw the status value of this and applied to the city’s elders for his as yet non-existent school also to be granted Guild status.
Curiously enough, they concurred and the Guild of Fools, Joculators, Minstrels, Buffoons and Mime Artists was created before the first student had been enrolled.
Over the years the Guild’s influence of all sorts of foolery is such that there soon were very few fools in civilised countries who were not graduates. It has been suggested that the new Guild became nothing more than a vast spy network, sending back to the House of Mirth snippets of political information which were used by the guild council to become enormously rich.
We must make it CLEAR that the Guild’s vast wealth accrues from PROWESS WITH THE CUSTARD PIE, CAREFUL CONTROL OVER EXPENDITURE and other Foolish activities. Dr Whiteface is no more than a hard-working administrator, and certainly NOT the cruel and devious international manipulator that UNSUBSTANTIATED RUMOUR makes him out to be. Anyone suggesting otherwise can expect a visit from the Jolly Good Pals in VERY SHORT ORDER.
M. Pune toured the Discworld to recruit the most experienced Fools, Jesters, Idiots and other specialists to tutor his new Guild. He wanted the Guild run on very austere lines, with students having to work from dawn to dusk.
He promised a regime of cold baths, hard wooden beds, self-flagellation, awful food and hours spent meticulously copying the manuscripts containing the true basis of humour, punning, pratfalls and the full paraphernalia of stomach-churningly embarrassing humour. This brought to the school a collection of fooldom’s bizarrest outsiders, misfits, sadists and sociopaths. In the early years, most students succumbed to malnutrition, exposure or poisoned book pages. The recruitment and selection of staff is still carried out to M. Pune’s specification – a grand tradition which has been upheld to this day, although with Lord Vetinari’s imposed health and safety guidelines, far more students now survive to graduate. Those who graduate in mime, however, generally don’t last long after going down. In the early days, students were recruited from those who had failed to get entry to any of the city’s other schools, colleges and Guilds. Although the FOOLS’ GUILD offered, and still offers, a high standard of general education, having a child who is to qualify as a bit of a prat still carries a certain social stigma and it is only very strange parents and, of course, Fools who send their children to the Guild.
Nevertheless, most of the Disc’s fools, jesters, minstrels, idiots and mimes herald from Ankh-Morpork’s Guild. Indeed, in 1788, it bought out La Sorbumme and now runs that as a summer school.
The Guild holds a strange position in city society. Most of the city’s wealthy and noble now avoid contact with the Guild and its officers, but, because of the enormous donations made by M. Pune, the Guild retains a high status on the City Council, though Doctor Whiteface tends to be treated like the leader of a political party that will never get to form a government.
THE JOLLY GOOD PALS (THE BLOODY FOOLS)
Comedy requires discipline, and discipline is the discipline of the Jolly Good Pals, the Guild’s enforcers, who are universally known by their nickname of The Bloody Fools.
Not so long ago they would be required to police fooldom in vigilant search for tellers of unregistered jokes, lack of prescribed honking and unlicensed foolery of all kinds. Since they were often a long way from the Guild their response had to be swift and memorable, which it certainly was in the case of the Cement Down the Trousers, the ‘Custard’ Pie and, of course, the Seesaw of Jolly Japes. Very few clowns ever got on that a second time.
Captain Billy ‘Clapstick Jack’ Nodger and his men patrol the Guild buildings and major places of entertainment and will deal with transgressions in immediate and (to bystanders at least) amusing ways.
A FOOL’S DAY
When the Guild was first set up, a Fool’s life was a very hard one. A typical summer regime was:
1.30am
Rise
2.00am
Nocturnal Jocularity (pillow fights, ‘apple pie’ beds, buckets over doors)
3.30am
Puns
5.30am
Breaking of Wind
6.00am
Lectio (Recital of the Known Jokes)
Chapter Meeting
Specialist work and lectures
8.00am
Locus Publicus (Public Joking, in the quadrangle)
Reading
11.30am
Crusta et Bracae Laxae (slapstick humour, lit.: pies & loose trousers)
Dinner
Rest
2.30am
Vesicae et Tintinnabulae (bladders & bells)
The Merr
y Jests
Supper
6.00pm
Liber Caerulus (Jokes for Adults)
The Eighteen Pratfalls
8.00pm
Comploratus (wailing and honking)
8.15pm
Retire to Bed
However, the Guild has moved with the times. Merry jests are no longer compulsory, and clowns may go for a walk instead. Breaking of wind is allowable at any time. Nor are the rising and retiring times so rigid. Indeed, in the summer, students are often still copying out the Great Approved Jokes into their exercise books until well after nine in the evening and in winter the day’s programme doesn’t usually start until well after 5.30am.
SLOSHI – THE FOOL’S MARTIAL ART
Even a cursory glance at a clowning routine will reveal the carefully moderated insane violence underneath it, and Sloshi is, in a nutshell, clowning without the moderation.
It had its origins in the travelling clowning companies of Überwald, where competing troupes would duel for the choicer sites. Eventually this became formalised amongst student clowns in the mountain areas around Müning, where the scars of a sloshi fighter were worn with pride (only in very informal company, however, since sloshi garb involved protective padding everywhere but the buttocks; showing the proud scars of battle became known, after the area, as ‘müning’.)
This was a highly stylised form of sloshi, making much use of the slapstick and pie, but battle sloshi is a different matter. Several Guild battalions have taken part in the defence of Ankh-Morpork during past wars, reaping a terrible revenge on enemies who literally died laughing. Indeed, the Guild Hall of Fame records that Uncle Bootsie, a sloshi master of the Seventh Nose, despatched seventeen Pseudopolitan mercenaries in one melee using nothing more than a ladder and two buckets of common wallpaper paste. In addition, forty-one mercenaries who witnessed the act were overpowered by the rest of the battalion while helpless with laughter.
It is strange but instructive to contrast the Guild with the ASSASSINS’ GUILD next door. One is a pleasant, airy building, whose corridors echo with the laughter of students and hum with the quiet activity of people working hard in a job they love – the other is gaunt, forbidding and silent except for the occasional muffled sob. One leaves its gates open most of the time and its graduates are considered to brighten up any party – the other operates its wretched craft behind locked doors and its members are regarded with disdain by right-thinking people. One turns out people who, admittedly, must in the course of their duties sometimes stab, poison or otherwise inhume their patients, but at least they never ask them to believe that pouring whitewash down someone’s trousers is funny.
Forest of Skund. Enchanted forest Rimwards of the RAMTOPS. The only forest in the entire universe to be called ‘Your finger, you fool’, the literal meaning of the word Skund. When the first explorers from the warm lands around the CIRCLE SEA travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just a Mountain and I Don’t Know, What? This is known as the ‘surly native’ technique of map-making. [LF]
Fox, Cassandra. Pupil at the Quirm College for the Daughters of Gentlefolk. A rather horsey gel. [SM}
Frank, Mister. Card sharp on the Vieux River riverboats, until he played Cripple Mr Onion against Granny Weatherwax. [WA]
Fresh Start Club. Motto: UNDEAD, YES – UNPERSON, NO. A club for those who are having difficulty in relating to being undead, founded by Reg SHOE, a zombie; it meets at 668 Elm Street, Ankh-Morpork, on the first floor, above a tailor’s shop. The entrance to the club was via an alleyway, at the end of which is a wooden door with a notice saying: ‘Come In! Come In! The Fresh Start Club. Being Dead is only the Beginning!!!’ Club slogans, all devised by Reg, include: ‘Dead Yes! Gone No!’, ‘Spooks of the World Arise, You Have Nothing to Lose but your Chains’, ‘The Silent Majority want Dead Rights’ and ‘End Vitalism Now!’ A sad place. Most of its members were embarrassed by the whole business but kept coming along so as not to upset Reg; the club is his whole life. As it were. Now that Reg has enthusiastically embraced a new life – as it were – in the WATCH, it is not known whether the Club is still in existence. [RM]
Fresnel’s Wonderful Concentrator. Spell used to create the flying lens on which RINCEWIND and TWOFLOWER are taken to KRULL. The spell calls for many rare and unstable ingredients, such as demon’s breath, and it takes eight fourth-grade wizards to envision. The lens itself is 20 feet across and totally transparent, with rings on to which passengers and the twenty-four HYDROPHOBES strap themselves, and a stubby pillar dead centre. [COM]
Fri’it, General Iam. Officer who ran most of the Omnian Divine Legion. He clicked his knuckles when worried, which was often. History remembers him as a fairly honest soldier who fell among priests and politicians. [SG]
Froc, General. Borogravian Army. Handsome, with a fine head of white hair and a scar down one side of his face, which just missed an eye and shows up clearly against the wrinkles. The General had the Froc coat and the Beef Froc named after him. Known, to some close friends, as Mildred. [MR]
Frog Pills, Dried. The wizards of UU are right at the forefront of modern medical thinking, and make up these for the current Bursar, who is mentally as stable as a tapdancer in a ballbearing factory.
Frord, Grisham. Leader of the Grisham Frord Close Harmony Singers, a cappella assassins and crack enforcers for the MUSICIANS’ GUILD. [SM]
Frottidge, Violet. One of DIAMANDA’S coven in LANCRE. (See also MAGENTA.) [LL]
Frout, Madam. Headmistress of the Frout Academy in Esoteric Street, Ankh-Morpork. and pioneer of the Frout Method of Learning Through Fun. Miss Frout, with her spectacles on a string around her neck, is not by any means a bad person and she is quite kind to children, in a haphazard way. However, she is rather silly and not a very good disciplinarian, which is a source of conflict with one of her teachers, Susan STO HELIT, who isn’t and is. She had once been a good, if rather shy, teacher. [TOT]
Fruni. Prophet of the Omnian religion. [SG]
Fruntkin. Dwarf who worked as a short-order chef in Nodar Borgle the Klatchian’s canteen in Holy Wood. [MP]
Fullomyth. An invaluable aid for all those whose business is with the arcane and hermetic. It contains lots of things that don’t exist and, in a very significant way, aren’t important. Some of its pages can be read only after midnight, or by strange and improbable illuminations. There are descriptions of underground constellations and wines as yet unfermented (see RE-ANNUAL PLANTS). For the really up-to-the-epoch occultist, who can afford the version bound in spider skin, there is even an insert showing the London Underground with three stations they never dare show on public maps. [S]
Furgle. Dwarf owner of a horn which sounded itself when danger was near, and also in the presence of, for some reason, horseradish. [SM]
Fusspot, Mr. A small, waddly, ugly dog with soulful eyes and a yappy bark, once owned by Topsy LAVISH. He reminds people of those goldfish with huge bulging eyes that look as if they are about to explode. Its nose looked stoved in, it wheezes, and its legs are so bandy that it must sometimes trip over its own feet. Mrs Lavish left Mr Fusspot shares in the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork. She then left the dog himself to Moist VON LIPWIG. Mr Fusspot was last seen in the company of Lord Vetinari. [MM]
Gaiter Family. Family for whom Susan STO HELIT worked as governess. Mr Gaiter was very successful in the wholesale boot and shoe business; Mrs Gaiter read books on etiquette and worried about whether a serviette should be called a napkin, especially since her husband persisted in not using either. Their children were Twyla and Gawain, which shows the damage that can be done when untrained people are let loose with a book of baby names. [H]
Galena. A troll who worked in the clicks in HOLY WOOD. His screen name was Rock Cliffe, although he
had been considering calling himself Flint and having a cement nose-job. (In MAA, a Flint was working in the armoury and later joined the WATCH, but there are not a great many troll names and it might well be a different Flint.) Galena has pointed ears, a nose which looks like Neanderthal Man’s first attempt at an axe, and a fist the size and hardness of a foundation stone. [MP, MAA]
Gamblers’ Guild. Motto: EXCRETVS EX FORTVNA. (Loosely speaking: ‘Really Out of Luck’.) Coat of arms: A shield, gyronny. On its panels, turnwise from upper sinister: a sabre or on a field sable; an octagon gules et argent on a field azure; a tortue vert on a field sable; an ‘A’ couronnée on a field argent; a sceptre d’or on a field sable, a calice or on a field azure; a piece argent on a field gules; an elephant gris on a field argent.
The arms represent the eight suits of the classic Ankh-Morpork pack of cards.
The Guildhouse is in the Street of Alchemists. Current President (chosen by the draw of a card) is Scrote Jones.
Guild membership is small, because it is restricted to professional gamblers. The Guild mainly exists to enforce rules about marked cards, loaded dice, shaved billiard balls and so on. Note that it does not ban them, it merely regularises the size of marks and weight of dice and closeness of shave. (Since all professional gamblers use these items a game between any two of them means that they are cancelled out and the contest becomes, perforce, a matter of skill and luck.) The Guild also very strictly controls the amount of money a member may take from a non-member (a ‘mark’) in any game; in the words of Scrote Jones, ‘If you want to make money out of keeping sheep you don’t rip their hides off all in one go.’ There are plenty of customers in Ankh-Morpork, where the basic gambling survival rules appear to be unknown. (Never play Find the Lady, play cards against anyone named after a city, or gamble in any game against anyone called Doc.)
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