Trickster

A figure from North American mythology, which has been used as an anthropological comparandum for the comic hero in the Old Comedy of Aristophanes. Both are crafty, lie and cheat, in order to achieve their aim of socially and culturally significant innovation. They are extremely inconsistent agents, and are distinguished by a high degree of corporeality and lust; like perverted culture-heroes, they strive to return to the primordial state of affairs that preceded the reign of Zeus. In their experimental dealings with the Other, alternative visions of the world are constructed in a grotesque, subversive mode, making it possible to re-energize one's view of everyday life. In the changed conditions of New Comedy, whose heroes are bourgeois figures moulded on Euripidean patterns, they no longer bear any relation to the figure of the trickster.