Stan Rogers on Morris Dancers...

[acroyear]

Morris dancers, for those of you who don't know, are cute people who dress up in little white suits with green sashes and pork-pie hats with feathers. They tie sleighbells to their feet and they strap long white hankies to their wrists. In any eventx There's nothing really alarming about Morris dancers; they're actually quite harmless.

Except that from time to time they will arm themselves with some kind of cudgel or bludgeon or some kind of blunt instrument. And they will gather in a knot or a mob known as a clot, or a team. And they'll gather in kind of a mystic circle and, to the accompaniment of accordion and violin, they will rhythmically and ritualistically hit each other again and again and again, with these sticks.

This is supposed to be some form of British fertility ritual, or some form of entertainment, or something. Anyway, this next song has the sort of knuckle dragging Neanderthal beat that Morris dancers really love to dance to.

From his usual intro to a song called "The Idiot". Go fig.

Comments

its one thing if it was new...

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

but morris jokes are as ancient as our records of the dance itself.

consider that when Shakespeare has the French mention it in Henry V:

DAUPHIN: And let us do it with no show of fear;
No, with no more than if we heard that England
Were busied with a Whitsun morris-dance

it wasn't meant to be flattering.

for me it does kinda go back to one of my earlier posts on my "character" at faire and how i'm not so much a flirt as i am a little kid once on site. In a sense, I play a foole; not the same type of foole that O or Sexton play, but its what I do and what I am and I like it.

and part of playing the fool is certainly being laughed at as well as laughed with.

if i was this graceful at taking the barb back in school as i am now, i might not have hated school so much ;-)