Fool

This retelling of King Lear from the point of view of the king’s jester (or “Fool”) named Pocket is a fun read, but prepare yourself. If you’re not into bawdy humor, stay away. Personally, I found the vulgar irreverence funny, and seeing the tragic events of the original happen around this character who isn’t really affected by any of it gave the story a unique perspective.

This book is like Shakespeare told by Monty Python after the iconic troop is given the okay to proceed with a hard R-rating. The humor plays in both the small moments and the larger,… show more.

Too pressed for time (and too lazy) to reread the original, I read Fool before seeing a production of King Lear at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Moore pulls out all the stops with this short but vivacious retelling of the play.

His fool, the profane and witty Pocket, orchestrates all the chaos of Shakespeare’s play—setting sister against sister, courtier against courtier, and snidely snubbing the great man himself, King Lear—without incurring too much bodily harm.

This version of King Lear ends rather more merrily than Shakespeare’s, with most of the characters still alive and entrenched in silliness.

Nearly any of Christopher Moore’s other books would have better fit this list generically, but I am relying (heavily) on the presence of fantastical creatures and magic spells to maintain the necessary toe in the fantasy pool for my non-sequitur selection of Fool. Based skeletally on Shakespeare’s King Lear, Fool credits Lear’s court jester, Pocket—along with MacBeth’s trio of witches, a “bloody ghost,” and other foils—for engendering the war that followed the king’s tragic decision to disinherit his kindest daughter in favor of his other conniving offspring. Linguistic and bawdy humor are packaged in Moore’s cockeyed… show more.