When Will Smith walked across the Oscars stage and slapped Chris Rock across the face for having made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith, it spawned a deluge of takes on Twitter (many of which are collected here), and, in the days since, innumerable think pieces. But in all the arguments over whether what Smith did was justified or at least understandable, one obvious, and important, aspect of the story got surprisingly little attention, namely that Chris Rock was not a random person in a bar who insulted another guy’s wife. Instead, he was someone who had been assigned, and was playing, the role not just of comedian, but of court jester. And that makes — or should have made — all the difference.

The figure of the jester, or the Fool, has existed in many cultures in many different eras, and though that figure has taken many different forms, one of its key characteristics is that jesters do not have to follow the same rules everyone else does, particularly when it comes to speech. They can say the things that others may be thinking but are too afraid to say, and can say them (usually) without fear of punishment. This is what defines the most famous jesters in Western culture, Shakespeare’s Fools, including Feste in Twelfth Night and the Fool in King Lear. In Lear, the Fool is the only character whom the old king allows to speak honestly to him, and he sees all the things about Lear that Lear refuses to see, or at least, admit about himself. And while Lear banishes his loyal servant Kent when Kent insists on telling him his treatment of his daughter Cordelia is wrong, Lear threatens his Fool with whipping only if he does not tell the truth.

The jester who’s allowed to tell the rich and powerful what others will not is not just a creature of Shakespeare’s imagination, but was in fact a common figure at courts around the world, as Beatrice Otto explains in her book Fools Are Everywhere. The 19th-century Persian Shah Nasredin, for instance, had a jester named Karim Shir’ei, who mocked not only the shah’s courtiers, but also the shah himself. Like other jesters, Shir’ei had no real power and exercised no authority. But because of this, in some sense, he was allowed to speak freely. The jester is a liminal figure, unlike the rest of us — he’s in the world, but not of it.

Comedians today are the closest thing we have to jesters. Some express the unrestrained id, acting out those impulses that we may feel but are required to repress in order to make society work: think of John Belushi or even Lenny Bruce. Some look to puncture the pieties of conventional life. Others play the classic court-jester role, mocking the wealthy and powerful. (Bill Burr’s classic routine about Steve Jobs is an archetypal example of this.) But all of them occupy an unusual, privileged space: we allow them to say what they want, typically without fear of retribution. Don Rickles, famously, did not spare Frank Sinatra from his insults, and Sinatra — who generally had no compunction about using violence to punish disrespect — not only never touched Rickles, but befriended him. Rickles became, in a sense, his Karim Shir’ei.

In practice, of course, giving comedians this kind of license has lots of negative effects. Many comics punch down, not up. Telling “tough truths” often means little more than repeating tired racist, sexist, or homophobic “jokes.” The id they’re channeling turns out, all too often, to be that of a 16-year-old boy. They’re unfunny. But while all of this true, it’s also the inevitable result of giving people the ability to speak freely without the risk of punishment (other than the punishment of people not laughing and no longer wanting to listen to them).

One response to this is that we don’t need jesters anymore, that the role is anachronistic and that standup comedy is a worn-out form built for a different time. On this reading, there’s no real social benefit to having Ricky Gervais be mean to celebrities at the Golden Globes or Chris Rock mocking stars at the Oscars. And while on balance I don’t agree with it, it’s a reasonable argument to make. What isn’t reasonable is accepting that we have people who have been given the role of comic and then saying that sometimes they should be hit if they go too far. Once you do that, you take away the thing that makes the jester as a figure interesting, namely the fact that they’re outside the rules of normal life. We all have to think twice before we talk. The comic, in some sense, is the one who doesn’t.

That’s why, when Smith slapped Rock, what he was breaking wasn’t some general social rule against responding to insults with violence. (There are lots of places in America where that norm isn’t really a thing.) Instead, he was breaking the bubble that we’ve let comedians exist in, and insisting that they can be punished for what they say. He was whipping the jester.