Ship of Fools

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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. The actual practice of sending a group of "fools" or madmen off in a ship to another European town was said to have originated in medieval times, but has recently been proven to be a legend.

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 play 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.
Ship of Fools, an artist collective on a seaworthy vessel sailing since 1993 on a festive pageant around the world in praise of folly. www.azart.org
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."

In music:

Ship of Fools, a Grateful Dead song
Ship of Fools, a Doors song
Ship of Fools, an Erasure song
Ship of Fools, an album by Tuxedomoon
Ship of Fools, a Robert Plant song
Ship of Fools, a World Party song
Ship of Fools, a John Cale song
Ship of Fools, a song by Yuki Kajiura for the Tsubasa Chronicle Soundtrack
Ship of Fools, a song from Soul Asylum
Ship of Fools, an album by John Renbourn
Ship of Fools, a song by Van Der Graaf Generator

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 Golgafrinchan B Ark in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Compare "God fashioned the ship of the world carefully" from The Black Riders by Stephen Crane.

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