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The Fool

"Going on a journey. I've got my cell if you need me."

"Sometimes it depresses me how well dumb luck works for you."

— Colonel Jevee Ceeta to Kaff Tagon, Schlock Mercenary

Not the kind of fool that Mr T pities.

The Fool has no idea what he's doing, he has a dim idea at best who his enemies are or whether he's in danger, and only has his cheerful disposition to protect him.

That and the blessing of Lady Luck herself. The Fool's strength comes from supernatural fortune bordering on Karma. Since The Fool is such a good person, nothing bad happens to them. The Big Bad may send hundreds of assassins, but each time The Fool will bend over at just the right time, or accidentally activate some Rube Goldberg-esque chain of events that leads to the villain's downfall. Occasionally their good luck will be siphoned from someone else around them so that they suffer bad luck. The Fool might even turn out to be The Chosen One, but he'd be the last one to suspect it.

The Fool was often the Audience Surrogate of medieval plays, representing the Everyman or Karmic Trickster, but typically more clever than smart. In the annual Feast of Fools, he was King For A Day.

For the Christopher Moore novel about the character from King Lear, see Fool.

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Machinima

The eponymous character from Freeman's Mind is anything but kind or inherently good-natured, but the vast majority of his progress through the series is through sheer dumb luck. Often times, he clears the way forward by doing seemingly random, unrelated things or just wandering around aimlessly until he finds somewhere he hasn't been already.
Freeman: Awwright! I'm making a lot of progress for not knowing what the hell I'm doing!

Music

The Fool on the Hill, of course.
A song by Brazilian group Tit�s has the line: "O acaso vai me proteger enquanto eu andar distra�do." - Meaning "Luck will protect me as long as I walk on absent-mindedly".
One of jazz composer Stan Kenton's most well known pieces is entitled "La Suerte de los Tontos" - which translates as "the luck of the fool."

Theatre

Every other Shakespeare play has the Fool, usually as a Foil of some sort. In more serious dramas, he replaces the Fool with Those Two Guys.
- In The Winter's Tale, the Shepherd's Son (for whom no name is given, but in some printings is called Clown) and to a lesser extent, the Shepherd.
- Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice goes from being an eccentric, useless, gluttonous, uneducated peasant forced to work for the local revenge-crazed villain to a professional jester who never has to do anything but make puns and whose new master, known for lavishing money on his servants, just won a mansion and buckets of cash. All this happens with no effort on Launcelot's part. He himself comments that, if Fortune is a woman, she must really like him.
A stock character of the Commedia dell'Arte genre.

Web Animation

The eponymous character from Homestar Runner, especially in the earlier cartoons, when Homestar would always beat Strong Bad, no matter how much Strong Bad cheated; Homestar was eventually flanderized into a character too stupid to know when he'd lost, which also frustrated Strong Bad's efforts.
Strong Bad: It's like, even when we win, he wins.
Pretty much every character in Red vs. Blue is The Fool. Caboose starts out as one as well, but he quickly descends to pure idiocy.

Web Original