From the self-abasements of Charlie Chaplin and Lenny Bruce’s provocations to the present-day culture warring over figures like Dave Chappelle and Hannah Gadsby, comedians have always been not simply entertainers, but charismatic observers of (and participants in) social anxieties and pathologies. Performers as varied as Mort Sahl, Richard Pryor, Margaret Cho, and Louis CK have courted both devotion and outrage at various points in their careers, as they cavort at the outer extremities of taboo, good taste, and received opinion.

In God’s Fools: Laughing Saints, Delirious Prophets, and the Sacred Makers of Comedy, religion and literature scholar Jason Crawford gives a penetrating and surprising look at the social role that comedians play by placing them in their proper historical lineage—one that begins not with vaudeville and minstrelsy but with the mystics, martyrs, and misfits of the premodern Judeo-Christian world. In Crawford’s expansive account, comedians like Chaplin and Chappelle mingle with such motley historical figures as St. Francis of Assisi, the first-century rabbi Akiba, and the Shakespearean collaborator Robert Armin. In lively and memorable character sketches, Crawford reveals the compelling through-lines that connect these figures to modern comedians, showing how, they attract devotion as exemplars of bad behavior—of a shabbiness transfigured by mystical insight—and act as lightning rods for rejection and punishment during times of deep cultural division.