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Good morning. The frontrunner in the presidential election in Ukraine is a professional comedian. At first I thought that was an April Fool. I know we are in a period of global political turbulence, but even against that backdrop it seems a bit far-fetched to have a comic as Head of State. Sounds like a perfect April 1st stunt. It’s very hard to work out the precise origin of April Fool’s Day and everyone seems to have their own theories. But one thing that interests me is what this annual festival of pranking has done to the word ‘fool’. Today you ‘fool’ someone by trying to deceive them into believing a falsehood. It’s about bending the truth, and so I thought I’d been fooled by that Ukrainian story. But traditionally the fool did the precise opposite. The fool was the person who could use humour to confront people with truth – with realities that they might otherwise have found unpalatable or hard to grasp. For example in King Lear, it is the Fool who alone can confront the monarch with the stupidity of what he has done in trusting the lies of his older daughters. His wit and cleverness provide the space that would be denied others to show that really it is Lear who is the greater fool. Many contemporary comedians do exactly the same. Felicity Ward for example is incredible in the way she can use humour to say searching things about deeply serious topics like depression and anxiety. And in fact the comedian who is leading the polls in Ukraine is part of this long tradition. Volodymyr Zelenskiy has used satire to devastating effect to make allegations of corruption against the government. He is the classic fool who uses the cover of humour to confront people with things they don’t want to hear. In his First Letter to the Corinthians St Paul uses the word ‘fool’ in this same way. In fact he seems all too happy to accept that he is a fool. Yes, he says, it’s foolish to worship a man who has died on a cross. It’s crazy to believe that eternal life can be found in such a bloody death. But, he claims, God’s foolishness subverts human wisdom. For a Christian the cross shows a completely different way of being human, one based on sacrificial love, one that looks crazy to many, but which for a Christian is life itself. Against a backdrop of uncertainty and worry, we need all the humour we can get right now. But perhaps above all we need old-fashioned fools who can use humour to speak out, to shake up and to turn casual assumptions upside down. That kind of humour can offer more than just laughter. It can give us rich self-understanding.