Jester's privilege

Jester's privilege is the ability and right of a jester to talk and mock freely without being punished; for nothing he says seems to matter.

Martin Luther used jest in many of his criticisms against the Catholic Church.^[1] In the introduction to To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation he calls himself a court jester, and, later in text, he explicitly invokes the jester's privilege when saying that monks should break their chastity vows.^[1]

References

1. Hub Zwart (1996), Ethical consensus and the truth of laughter: the structure of moral transformations, Morality and the meaning of life 4, Peeters Publishers, p. 156, ISBN 9789039004128

• The King's Jester: Modern style, Albert Jay Nock, Harper's Magazine, March 1928
• Alla: the Jester-Queen of Russian pop culture
• The London Quarterly Review
• The wit of Martin Luther
• The new international encyclopæeia, Volume 5
• Hub Zwart (1999) The truth of laughter: Rereading Luther as a contemporary of Rabelais. Dialogism. An International Journal of Bakhtin Studies, 1 (3), 52-77.