In one famous tale, a neighbour asks to borrow Juha’s donkey. “The donkey isn’t here,” Juha replies. At that very moment, the animal begins braying loudly from behind the house. “But Juha, I can hear your donkey!” protests the neighbour. Juha looks offended: “Who are you going to believe me or the donkey?”

It is funny because it is ridiculous, but like the best Juha stories, the joke becomes less ridiculous the longer one thinks about it. People deny obvious facts, pride prevents us from admitting a lie even after it has been exposed, and authority sometimes asks to be believed over our own eyes and ears. A tiny joke about a donkey suddenly contains a small philosophy of human behaviour.

That is the peculiar genius of Juha and he is far from alone. Across continents, religions and languages, humanity has created an extraordinary family of fools, tricksters, jesters and mischievous outsiders. They make fools of kings, merchants, clerics, bureaucrats and, frequently, themselves. They allow societies to laugh at greed, vanity, hypocrisy, authority and human stupidity. Their names and costumes are different, but their jokes are surprisingly familiar.

Juha’s Travelling Cousins

The first complication in telling this story is also one of the most fascinating: these characters cannot always be neatly assigned to modern national borders. The traditions surrounding Juha and Nasreddin Hoca, for example, belong to a much wider and overlapping world of humorous storytelling. Nasreddin anecdotes are shared across a vast geographical area, and UNESCO today recognizes the storytelling tradition associated with Nasreddin under several names as common cultural heritage across Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Türkiye, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The stories have travelled orally and in writing, changing names and details along the way. Humour, it seems, was practising cultural diplomacy long before anyone invented the term.

One famous Nasreddin story has him searching desperately beneath a street lamp. “What have you lost?” someone asks. “My key.” Several people join the search until one finally asks whether he is certain he lost it there. “No,” Nasreddin replies, “I lost it over there.” “Then why are we searching here?” “Because the light is better here.” Centuries later, the joke remains remarkably modern. Governments, companies and individuals still have an impressive talent for searching for answers where it is easiest to look rather than where the answer is likely to be. The technology changes; the street lamp remains.

Jewish-Yiddish folklore has Hershele Ostropoler, the poor wandering trickster whose principal capital is his intelligence. Hershele belongs to a tradition in which humour can serve as protection: the poor man cannot command the wealthy man, but he can make him look foolish; he cannot abolish an unjust situation, but he can expose its absurdity. This is one of the recurring characteristics of the world’s tricksters: they are rarely powerful. Their humour works precisely because they are not. When you cannot defeat power with power, sometimes you defeat it with a punchline.

Germany’s great representative of this tradition is Till Eulenspiegel, the legendary prankster whose tales became extraordinarily popular in early modern Europe. The oldest surviving German printed version dates from 1515, although the stories themselves draw on an older tradition. Eulenspiegel possesses a particularly dangerous habit: he takes people at their word. Give him an instruction carelessly and he may obey it so literally that the result becomes disastrous. Craftsmen, innkeepers, clerics, nobles and respectable citizens discover that their own language can be turned against them. Eulenspiegel does not always need to break the rules; he simply follows them too well. Anyone who has ever encountered bureaucracy may recognise the technique.

In Greece, generations grew up with Karagiozis, the ragged hero of traditional shadow theatre. He is poor, hungry, opportunistic and endlessly inventive hardly a model citizen, which is precisely why audiences love him. The respectable characters around him may possess money, titles and authority, but Karagiozis possesses something more immediately useful: an ability to survive. He lies, boasts, misunderstands and improvises his way through impossible situations. Sometimes he wins; sometimes his schemes collapse spectacularly. The wise fool must occasionally be genuinely foolish, otherwise he becomes a lecturer and nobody has gathered around the dinner table for centuries to hear a lecturer explain the moral of the story.

India’s storytelling traditions offer several celebrated masters of wit, among the most famous being Tenali Raman, based on the Telugu poet Tenali Ramakrishna associated with the sixteenth-century Vijayanagara court of Krishnadevaraya. Folklore transformed him into the hero of countless stories in which intelligence triumphs over arrogance and difficult situations are escaped through unexpected answers. India also has Birbal, the historical adviser to Mughal emperor Akbar who similarly became the hero of a vast storytelling tradition. The setting is different from Juha’s village world palaces instead of donkeys and emperors instead of neighbours but the engine of the joke is remarkably similar: the supposedly powerful person controls the situation; the clever person controls its meaning.

West African traditions give us Anansi, the spider trickster particularly associated with Akan and Asante storytelling in present-day Ghana. Anansi is clever, ambitious, selfish, inventive and gloriously imperfect. Sometimes he triumphs because he is cleverer than everyone else; sometimes his own greed defeats him. His cultural journey, however, gives the character an importance extending far beyond comedy. Anansi stories crossed the Atlantic with enslaved Africans and took root particularly strongly in the Caribbean, where the character became an enduring connection with African cultural memory. People could be forcibly displaced and deprived of almost everything they possessed, yet a story required no suitcase. It could travel in the mind.

There are many others: Bulgaria has Hitar Petar, Romania Păcală, Portuguese and Brazilian traditions Pedro Malasartes, Korean folklore Kim Seondal, and Yoruba storytelling Ijapa the Tortoise. They are not identical, nor should we imagine that every resemblance developed independently. Stories travelled with merchants, migrants, soldiers, pilgrims and travellers; jokes were borrowed, translated, adapted and given new heroes. That makes their similarities even more interesting. The history of humour is also a history of cultural exchange. Long before novels became international bestsellers, before cinema, television or social media, a good joke could cross a border. Someone simply had to remember it.

Why Does Every Culture Need a Fool?

The wise fool possesses an extraordinary privilege: he is allowed to be ridiculous. That gives him freedom. A respectable person must protect his reputation; a courtier must be careful around the king; a poor man around the rich man; a subordinate around his superior. The fool can ask the question everyone else is afraid to ask, misunderstand a rule and thereby demonstrate how ridiculous it is, or expose hypocrisy while appearing not to understand it. Most importantly, the joke can travel where criticism cannot. Where directly challenging political, religious or social authority carried consequences, humour could provide camouflage: it was only a story, only a fool, only a joke and yet everybody understood.

The genius of these traditions is that their criticism does not point exclusively upwards. Juha himself can be dishonest, Nasreddin absurd, Anansi greedy, Karagiozis lazy and Hershele opportunistic. The fool allows us to laugh at authority while quietly reminding us that we are not necessarily much wiser. Everyone eventually becomes the target, and perhaps that is one reason these stories have survived political systems, empires and social conventions that disappeared centuries ago.

From the Folk Trickster to Tom Sawyer and Pippi

Then something interesting happens. We leave characters shaped collectively through generations of storytelling and enter the world of identifiable authors and literary creations. These figures are not folk tricksters in exactly the same sense as Juha, Hershele or Eulenspiegel. They have authors, novels and carefully constructed personalities. Yet something of the ancient wise fool survives inside them.

One of the finest examples is Tom Sawyer. Mark Twain gives Tom one of literature’s great acts of psychological trickery when Aunt Polly punishes him by making him whitewash a fence. Tom does not escape the work; he does something considerably cleverer. He begins painting as though whitewashing a fence were a rare privilege. Soon the other boys want to try, and eventually they are giving Tom their possessions for the opportunity to perform his punishment for him. Juha would have approved. Tom has discovered something advertisers and luxury brands still understand extremely well: people often desire something more intensely when they believe it is difficult to obtain.

From Sweden came another kind of troublemaker. Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking is not a traditional wise fool but something more modern and, in her own way, more revolutionary. Pippi is extraordinarily strong, independent, imaginative, generous and almost completely uninterested in behaving as respectable adults expect children to behave. Adults present rules; Pippi asks why. Adults invoke convention; Pippi wonders whether convention makes any sense. Her humour comes from reversing the normal relationship between child and adult: the grown-ups supposedly understand the world, while Pippi repeatedly exposes how strange their world actually is. Like the old tricksters, she enjoys the freedom of the outsider. She does not defeat authority by becoming more authoritative; she simply refuses to be impressed by it.

Spain gave literature a much more complex wise fool in Don Quixote. Cervantes created a man who reads so many tales of chivalry that he decides to become a knight himself, seeing giants where others see windmills and heroic adventures where everyone else sees ordinary life. At first we laugh because Don Quixote cannot see reality, but Cervantes gradually plays a remarkable trick on the reader. The longer we travel with him, the harder it becomes to decide who is actually foolish: the man who believes too much in courage, honour, justice and idealism, or the sensible people who have stopped believing in them altogether? The fool has become philosopher.

Czech literature offers another variation in The Good Soldier Švejk, created by Jaroslav Hašek. Švejk appears almost impossibly foolish as he moves through the absurd machinery of military bureaucracy. Yet a suspicion follows him everywhere: what if he understands perfectly? By responding to authority with exaggerated obedience and literalness, Švejk exposes how irrational authority itself can become. Here Till Eulenspiegel meets the twentieth-century bureaucracy. The centuries have changed; the joke has not.

The tradition, of course, has not disappeared. We still invent characters whose names alone seem to promise a story. Imagine two thoroughly modern tricksters: Gino Giglio and Bruno Bruni.

“Gino Giglio and Bruno Bruni walk into a diplomatic reception in Berlin. Nobody knows who invited them but by the end of the evening, they’re both on the panel.”

Juha might have arrived on a donkey and Tenali Raman at an emperor’s court, but Gino and Bruno have discovered the modern equivalent: the international conference. The setting changes; human nature does not.

What Makes the Whole World Laugh?

Imagine these characters around one enormous dinner table. Juha arrives on his donkey; Nasreddin insists he has already arrived; Hershele is wondering who will pay for dinner; Eulenspiegel has deliberately misunderstood the invitation; Karagiozis is trying to obtain a second meal without paying for the first; Tenali Raman has discovered how to make the emperor pay; Anansi has a plan that will probably make everything worse; Tom Sawyer has persuaded somebody else to wash the dishes; Pippi has decided dessert should come first; Don Quixote thinks the waiter is an enchanted prince; and Švejk patiently explains that he is merely following orders.

Different centuries, religions, languages and continents yet their adversaries are remarkably familiar: vanity, greed, hypocrisy, bureaucracy, pomposity, foolish rules, excessive seriousness and the eternal human conviction that the fool is somebody else. Cultures reveal themselves not only through their monuments, wars, rulers, paintings and great books, but also through what makes them laugh. Beneath all our differences, humanity appears to have spent centuries laughing at remarkably similar things.

Perhaps humour is therefore one of our oldest forms of cultural diplomacy. A joke crosses a border without a passport. It changes its name, acquires a different costume, replaces a donkey with a horse or a king with an emperor and somehow the people on the other side still understand.

Juha would probably find this explanation unnecessarily complicated.

And he might be right.