Patty Limerick: Nearly 40 years of fun and foolery

Not only did CU-Boulder professor Patty Limerick review nearly four decades of service and the value of humor on April Fool’s Day, she was on that very day proclaimed by CU President Bruce D. Benson to be the official University Fool.

At the April 1 discussion on humor, Limerick described the role of the fool and its deep origins in human society.  In the past, kings and queens recognized the value—really, the necessity—of appointing fools who would speak openly and even festively of uncomfortable matters that would otherwise proliferate and fester, she said. By breaking the spell of caution, timidity and fear that held others under its power, fools dissipated and dispelled a society’s accumulation of bad luck. Composed of the world’s strangest blend of wisdom and nonsense this tradition fell into disuse because of a mistaken notion that fools were no longer needed in democracies, she said.

In the mid-1970s, a graduate student named Patty Nelson (who would soon acquire the providentially silly surname “Limerick”) undertook to restore and reactivate this important social role. When she declared her candidacy for the position of Yale University Fool, this historic occasion earned recognition in The New York Times and The International Herald-Tribune. In the early 1980s, with her national and international reputation for folly secured, Limerick easily rose to the top of the Fool Pool at Harvard, and then, soon after her relocation to Boulder, at the University of Colorado.

The Center of the American West’s Humor Initiative was created to celebrate individuals whose temperaments support a central conviction of the Center of the American West: A dose of good humor is essential to constructive public discussion, and not coincidentally, to public health. Its centerpiece is the Distinguished Visiting Fool for a Day Award that will be presented once a year on the CU-Boulder campus.

CU-Boulder’s Center of the American West works on a variety of regional issues, including water management, relationships between federal agencies and communities, land planning, Native identity, recent art and literature, and the balance of power between tradition and innovation in Western life. The center takes as its mission the creation of forums for the respectful exchange of ideas in pursuit of solutions to the region’s difficulties. The center believes that an understanding of the historical origins of the West’s problems, an emphasis on the common interests of all parties, and a dose of good humor are essential to constructive public discussion. 

Limerick is the faculty director and chair of the board of the Center of the American West.

For more information, visit the Center of the American West’s website at www.centerwest.org or call 303-492-4879.

Contact:
Patty Limerick, 303-492-4879 
Jessica Brawner, 303-492-4879