The Idiot

In John Kendrick Bangs's delightfully anarchic 1869 satire, the Idiot is not who you might expect. Living at Mrs. Pedagog's select boarding house for single gentlemen, he engages fellow residents, Mr. Pedagog the schoolmaster, the Bibliomaniac, and various other dignified pillars of society, in debates so absurd they somehow reveal profound truths about human folly. The Idiot argues, with flawless logic, for living on a canal boat instead of a proper house. He questions why gentlemen should wear hats. He defends positions so seemingly ridiculous that only a fool would voice them, yet his reasoning leaves his irritated interlocutors spluttering. <br><br>What makes this comedy endure is its delightful inversion: the Idiot speaks nonsense that works better than the sensible positions of his companions. His arguments are so consistently, brilliantly wrong that they become right, not through contradiction, but through the exposure of how arbitrary and unexamined conventional wisdom really is. Bangs writes with the light touch of a man who understands that sometimes the only honest response to Victorian pomposity is to become deliberately, magnificently idiotic. The result is a comic masterpiece that proves the fool may indeed see what the wise have overlooked.