Ship of Fools

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The ship of fools is an old allegory, which has long been used in Western culture in literature and paintings. With a sense of self-criticism, it describes the world and its human inhabitants as a vessel whose deranged passengers neither know nor care where they are going. Ships of Fools featured as wagons in medieval Carnival Parades.

Ship of Fools may also refer to:

In art:

• The Ship of Fools, a painting by Hieronymus Bosch
• Ship of Fools (Narrenschiff), a 1494 satire by Sebastian Brant
• Ship of Fools, a short story by Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber
• Ship of Fools, a 1962 novel by Katherine Anne Porter
• Ship of Fools, a 1965 motion picture, based on the novel
• Ship of Fools, a 2001 award-winning science fiction novel by Richard Paul Russo
• The Ship of Fools, a 2001 novel by Gregory Norminton

In music: Ship of fools is frequently used in popular music. Acts who have recorded songs title "Ship of Fools include: Scorpions, Grateful Dead, Doors, Erasure, Tuxedomoon, Robert Plant, World Party, John Cale, Bob Seger, Yuki Kajiura (for the Tsubasa Chronicle Soundtrack), Soul Asylum, Van der Graaf Generator and Alphaville. It is also the title of an album by John Renbourn.

In other contexts:

• Ship of Fools, a popular UK-based Christian website
• Ship of Fools, an apocryphal medieval European method of dealing with mental illness
• The Ship of Fools, an improv comedy troupe made up of students from Purdue University
• The Golgafrinchan B Ark in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
• A Far Side comic depicts two pictures, one of a car full of people, and the other as a ship full of people, and captions them as "Ship of Fools" and "Car of Idiots."