The Twitch Streamer as a Digital Jester

We all know the image of the court jester: a funny little guy dressed in bright colors and a silly hat, maybe doing a weird-looking dance or acting out a humorous scene for the entertainment of some kind of royalty. These days, when we think of a court jester, it is often associated with a lack of prestige or even humanity; the court jester exists only to entertain. Outside of that, he is not much of anything.

Another character a lot of us have gotten acquainted with over the past decade, is that of the livestreamer, commonly found on Twitch. They are known to livestream themselves playing video games, or doing really any other activity, interacting with their audience in real time. In some ways, the Twitch streamer and the jester are similar. They are both there to entertain an audience, usually because they’re in some way humorous.

The Bad Example

In medieval literature, the jester most often appears as a satirical character, embodying human foolishness. While, or maybe exactly because he does a good job entertaining an audience and making people laugh, usually the jester is put into a story with the intention of getting across some kind of lesson: “see this person? See how silly and backwards he is? Don’t be like the jester. He is the exact opposite of what you should want to be.” Are there any streamers that unwittingly fulfil that role in today’s society? The one streamer that immediately comes to mind for me when I think about a “bad example” is xQc. The French-Canadian streamer is known for his rage-fueled rants, nearly-unintelligable outbursts and various expressions of pure ignorance (for those not familiar with this guy, watching just a few minutes of this video should be enough to get an idea of what I’m talking about). Sure, these moments are funny, but I can’t imagine ever wanting to be like him myself. Another example of the “don’t be like this guy”-guy, would be Asmongold, partly known for his disgusting, cockroach-infested streaming room. Entertaining, sure, but not at all someone I would want to be.

The Speaker of Truth

Sometimes, though not very often, the jester would take on the role of the revealer of truth in a story. For the duration of the storyline, different characters (and possibly even the readers or listeners) would get duped or misled for the gain of the villain of the story. At the end, preferably with all the other characters together in one scene, the jester would come in and tell everyone what had actually been going on this whole time. You’ve been lied to! And this is the guy you should be upset with! The reason jesters were able to take on this function in literature, is because they were usually on the sidelines of whatever society was being portrayed, instead of in the middle of it. Looking in from the outside, they could see exactly what was going on and who was messing with who. Sort of a fool on the hill type situation. An example of this in the Twitch community could be HasanAbi, a political commentator on the platform. In my opinion, his speaker-of-truth status doesn’t come from himself; from what I’ve seen he doesn’t present himself as the one and only source of correct information. This status seems to be given to him by the most die-hard members of his audience more than anyone else. They will always agree with him, and anyone who doesn’t agree with him is wrong. Outside of Hasan, there are also certain creators who will occasionally focus on drama within the community, discussing it with their own audiences. Though this often isn’t their main content by any means, the moments in which they decide to talk about some spectacle taking place on the platform or someplace else, they briefly take on the role of the truth-speaker for their audience.

Can a Streamer Be Considered a Digital Jester?

As we’ve seen, there’s certain similarities to be found between the Twitch streamer and the medieval jester. There are a few glaring differences, though. A succesful Twitch streamer is often held in a higher regard than a succesful court jester would be. The court jester will always be subservient to and dependent on his audience: royal members of the court. Though it could be argued that a Twitch streamer is also dependent on their audience, and that the audience are really the ones who are in charge, in my eyes this is not the case to the extent of the court jester/ royal court relationship. A streamer, at the end of the day, controls what they do or say on stream, including being able to make rude remarks to their own audience, where the worst outcome possible would be the loss of that audience. A court jester would not be able to speak to their audience in the same way without consequence. On top of that, a Twitch streamer is in control of their audience; they can ban people from their stream as they please. The court jester did not have that luxury.

On top of that, a court jester would sometimes just be a person with physical deformities or mental problems that would be exploited for the entertainment of the court. On Twitch, while you could also argue this happens to some extent, the streamer ends up being the one in control of whether or not they go live for their audience at all, while a court jester like this often could not make that decision for themselves.

Having said all this, I still think the similarities between the court jester and the Twitch streamer are striking. As such, in my opinion, a Twitch streamer could be referred to as a digital jester, just not without some reservations.