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SOCIAL types comprise a relatively unappreciated field of popular culture. Though certain ones have been intensively studied from special points of view and the role of stereotypes has been long recognized, there has been little effort to catalog, classify, or even adequately consider the vast number of highly significant types to be found in common speech, jokes, comics, popular fiction, folklore and the like. These conceptions, appearing wherever the popular mind finds expression, are truly collective in nature rather than the property of individual authors, coins of thought as Sumner phrased it, serving to express group judgments, facilitate consensus, and define roles. This article is concerned with three especially significant generic figures, the hero, villain and fool, and aims to state a theory of their normative nature, role as
Orrin E. Klapp (Mon,) studied this question.