archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Authored taxonomy · an archetype

Trickster (Vogler)

The laugh that lets the air out of the room.

Christopher Vogler’s character archetype, in The Writer’s Journey (1992), for the clown, comic sidekick or mischief-maker who deflates egos, brings comic relief and stirs change while often staying unchanged. Jung’s word for a narrative role; the classical trickster is a different object.

Vogler’s Trickster is the function of mischief in a story. It is carried by the clown, the wisecracking sidekick, the con artist or the comic troublemaker, and it does two jobs. Dramatically it supplies comic relief. Psychologically, in Vogler’s reading, it is a corrective: it deflates the self-important and jolts a stuck situation into motion by making its absurdity visible. Many tricksters, he notes, are catalysts who change the people around them while staying much the same themselves. The role can be held by a minor character or by the hero, and the “trickster hero” of cartoons and comedies is one of Vogler’s main cases.

Go deeper

At the threshold

I am that merry wanderer of the night.I jest to Oberon, and make him smile,When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile,Neighing in likeness of a filly foal;And sometime lurk I in a gossip’s bowlIn very likeness of a roasted crab,And, when she drinks, against her lips I bob,And on her withered dewlap pour the ale.

Public domain · Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act II, scene i (Puck) (1600)

Puck introduces himself as the jester who makes his master smile with pranks on horses and gossips, comic relief announced as a job.

Constellation

The figures who carry it

Hover a star. Jung’s own examples are marked; the rest are readings applied later, and the entry below says by whom.

All 5 figures as a list
  1. Jung’s example

    Bugs Bunny

    Vogler, The Writer’s Journey (2nd ed., 1998), “Trickster”, 1940

    Vogler’s modern form of the folktale rabbit, the trickster as hero who always outwits the hunter.

  2. Jung’s example

    Loki

    Vogler, The Writer’s Journey (2nd ed., 1998), “Trickster”, c. 1220

    Counsellor to the gods who also plots against them, Vogler’s mythic case.

  3. Jung’s example

    Axel Foley

    Vogler, The Writer’s Journey (2nd ed., 1998), “Trickster”, 1984

    Stirs up a stiff police department and leaves it changed while he stays himself, Vogler’s catalyst trickster.

  4. a later reading

    The Marx Brothers

    Voytilla, Myth and the Movies (1999), 1929

    Read as the embodiment of the Trickster, gleefully overturning every ordered room they enter.

  5. a later reading

    Captain Jack Sparrow

    Pirates of the Caribbean; read as Trickster by Final Draft, 2003

    A pirate whose shifting schemes keep allies and enemies equally off balance.

The wider sky

Where the Trickster (Vogler) has been seen

22 exemplars across 10 fields, from myth to this year. Each is marked as Jung’s own example, a scholar’s reading, a widely published reading, or ours.

Hover a field in the sky, or choose one above, to read its exemplars.

Interlude

O Jeany, dinna toss your head,An’ set your beauties a’ abread!Ye little ken what cursed speedThe blastie’s makin:Thae winks an’ finger-ends, I dread,Are notice takin.O wad some Power the giftie gie usTo see oursels as ithers see us!It wad frae mony a blunder free us,An’ foolish notion:What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,An’ ev’n devotion!

Public domain · Burns, To a Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church (closing stanzas) (1786)

A louse climbing a proud bonnet in church does what Vogler asks of the Trickster, cutting airs down to size so that people might see themselves as others do.

When the speech gets too grand, someone trips over the furniture.

Nothing about him changes; everything around him does.

The king is still the king, but now the court can breathe.

The deep layer · what was written

Trickster (Vogler): the entry

Definition

Vogler’s Trickster is the function of mischief in a story. It is carried by the clown, the wisecracking sidekick, the con artist or the comic troublemaker, and it does two jobs. Dramatically it supplies comic relief. Psychologically, in Vogler’s reading, it is a corrective: it deflates the self-important and jolts a stuck situation into motion by making its absurdity visible. Many tricksters, he notes, are catalysts who change the people around them while staying much the same themselves. The role can be held by a minor character or by the hero, and the “trickster hero” of cartoons and comedies is one of Vogler’s main cases.

The word is Jung’s, by way of Paul Radin and Campbell, but the object is different. Jung’s trickster is a figure of myth that he read as a collective shadow, the memory of a cruder stage of consciousness kept alive in story and festival. Vogler’s Trickster is a comic function available to any script. The classical entry on the trickster already records Vogler’s use as a narrative role; it is about the mythic figure and Jung’s reading of it.

History

The Trickster is the one figure on Vogler’s list that does not appear, even in passing, in his studio memo, “A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, written at Walt Disney in the mid-1980s and dated 1985 on the copy he later posted. The memo’s recurring figures are the young hero, the wise old man or woman, the shape-shifting woman or man and the shadowy antagonist. Vogler’s retrospective says the archetype material came later, as the memo grew into a course and then a book.

The Writer’s Journey (1992) placed the Trickster last of its archetypes. In the second edition (1998), the earliest book text checked for this entry, the section (pp. 77–80) opens with a line of Daffy Duck’s and a definition:

The Trickster archetype embodies the energies of mischief and desire for change. — Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey (2nd ed., 1998), “Trickster”, pp. 77–80

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

Under its psychological function Vogler has tricksters “cut big egos down to size” and return heroes and audiences to earth through laughter; their chief work, he says, is healthy change, prompted by showing up what is unbalanced or absurd. Its dramatic function Vogler heads “Comic Relief”. Vogler’s examples are his own and largely comic: Loki, who serves the Norse gods as counsellor while plotting against them; Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop, stirring up the system as a catalyst without changing himself, and in 48 Hrs.; and Bob Hope as the clown of the Crosby–Hope pictures. A subsection on trickster heroes traces them through folktales to the rabbit trickster’s modern form, Bugs Bunny, and notes that Mickey Mouse began as an animal trickster. The summary of the archetypes once posted on Vogler’s site gives clowns and mischief-makers, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy, and an inner sense: our own mischievous subconscious, urging us to change. The third (2007) and 25th-anniversary (2020) editions keep the figure under the same name.

Vogler draws the figure from mythology and from Campbell, who tells of trickster figures such as the Yoruba Edshu and the Raven of the Bering Strait in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), and, behind Campbell, from the ethnologists’ category that Paul Radin’s The Trickster (1956), with Jung’s commentary, made familiar to a wider public. The claim to that lineage holds for the word and for some of the figures. It does not hold for the reading: Jung’s trickster carries a culture’s outgrown past, while Vogler’s carries comic timing and the healthy deflation of egos.

The debate

The relation to the classical trickster is the same narrowing seen across Vogler’s list. In Jung, and in the anthropology he drew on, the trickster is amoral, bodily, often obscene, a creator by accident and a danger as much as a joke; Lewis Hyde (1998) treats him as the boundary-crosser who makes culture possible. Vogler keeps the disruption and the laughter and leaves out the danger, the appetite and the sacred. His trickster is benign by design, a corrective to pomposity whose mischief serves the hero’s growth or the audience’s relief. That makes it a useful screenwriting tool and a poor guide to the figures in myth, where Loki’s mischief ends in the death of a god.

The published criticism of Vogler bears on the Trickster in two ways. First, through the general charge of formula, which Vogler acknowledged in his 1998 preface as the suspicion of artists and critics that the approach leads to stale repetition, and answered by calling it a form rather than a formula: the comic sidekick is one of the most recognisable stock roles in studio films. Second, through the route by which Jung’s vocabulary reached him. David Bordwell (2006, p. 34) describes Vogler’s archetypes as derived from Campbell, Jung and his own imagination, and Harry Kirchner (2009) calls the book’s Jungian paradigm one reached through “pop anthropologist” Campbell; the Trickster, whose Jungian and anthropological meaning is the furthest from Vogler’s, is the strongest case for both observations.

Empirical status

None. The Trickster is a craft category and has not been tested as a construct. Humour research in psychology is extensive, but none of it tests Vogler’s claim about a recurring trickster function in stories.

Appearances

Craft writers who apply Vogler name tricksters freely. Stuart Voytilla’s Myth and the Movies (1999) gives the archetype the motto “to disrupt” and calls the Marx Brothers its embodiment. Connie Neal (2007), writing from Vogler’s framework, reads Peeves the Poltergeist as a classic mischief-making trickster in the Harry Potter books. Stavros Halvatzis (2017), crediting Vogler, names Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Eddie Murphy’s detective in Beverly Hills Cop and Iago, a trickster with the traits of a Shadow. Final Draft’s guide (2024) offers Jack Sparrow, the Marvel films’ Loki and the Genie of Disney’s Aladdin, and Jenn Brisendine (2018) the mythic tricksters Loki, Coyote and Maui. These are readings in Vogler’s sense; the mythic figures among them have their own, older meanings, which the classical entry records.

Sources

  • Vogler, C. (1985). A practical guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces (studio memo, Walt Disney). Text, Vogler’s account of its writing, and his summary of the archetypes as posted on thewritersjourney.com, archived 14 December 2017: http://web.archive.org/web/20171214034841/http://www.thewritersjourney.com/hero%27s_journey.htm
  • Vogler, C. (1992). The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters. Michael Wiese Productions. ISBN 978-0-941188-13-5.
  • Vogler, C. (1998). The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (2nd ed.). Michael Wiese Productions. ISBN 978-0-941188-70-8. Preface; Book One, “Trickster”, pp. 77–80. Read via the Internet Archive full-text search: https://archive.org/details/writersjourneymy00vogl
  • Vogler, C. (2007). The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (3rd ed.). Michael Wiese Productions. ISBN 978-1-932907-36-0.
  • Vogler, C. (2020). The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (25th-anniversary ed.). Michael Wiese Productions. ISBN 978-1-61593-315-0.
  • Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton University Press edition, 1968. ISBN 978-0-691-01784-6.
  • Jung, C. G. (1954). On the psychology of the trickster-figure. CW 9i. In P. Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (1956).
  • Hyde, L. (1998). Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-27928-8.
  • Bordwell, D. (2006). The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-24622-5. P. 34.
  • Kirchner, H. (2009). Review of S. Maras, Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice. Screening the Past, 26. https://www.screeningthepast.com/issue-26-reviews/screenwriting-history-theory-and-practice/
  • Voytilla, S. (1999). Myth and the Movies: Discovering the Mythic Structure of 50 Unforgettable Films. Michael Wiese Productions. ISBN 978-0-941188-66-1.
  • Neal, C. (2007). Wizards, Wardrobes and Wookiees: Navigating Good and Evil in Harry Potter, Narnia and Star Wars. IVP Books. ISBN 978-0-8308-3366-5.
  • Halvatzis, S. (2017, 23 April). An understanding of archetypes is fundamental in helping writers create new and viable characters. https://stavroshalvatzis.com/on-character/character-archetypes-stories
  • Miyamoto, K. (2024, 24 April). Breaking down the character archetypes of the hero’s journey. Final Draft blog. https://www.finaldraft.com/blog/breaking-down-the-character-archetypes-of-the-heros-journey
  • Brisendine, J. (2018, 7 September). Hero, mentor, trickster: thinking about archetypal character roles in MG. From the Mixed-Up Files. https://fromthemixedupfiles.com/hero-mentor-trickster-thinking-about-archetypal-roles-in-mg/

Leaving

“You are old,” said the youth, “one would hardly supposeThat your eye was as steady as ever;Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose—What made you so awfully clever?”“I have answered three questions, and that is enough,”Said his father; “don’t give yourself airs!Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?Be off, or I’ll kick you down stairs!”

Public domain · Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, chapter V (‘You are old, Father William’), closing stanzas (1865)

The absurd old man balances an eel on his nose, refuses a fourth question and kicks the solemn questioner downstairs, the clown keeping the last word.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey⚡ TricksterAppetite, cunning and disorder, kept alive on purpose.Return to the void