Tricksters are some of the most popular figures in mythology, despite their questionable morality. In Freudian terms, tricksters are instruments of the id, usually male, the con men of mythology, sometimes clever and devious, and other times moronic. Tricksters are "figures of play" (Leonard and McClure 247) "yet the Trickster's playfulness can carry with it serious, even tragic or transcendent, overtones. . . . embodying all the infinite ambiguities of what it is to be alive in the world" (Leonard and McClure 250). The trickster "'combines in his nature the sacredness and sinfulness, grand gestures and pettiness, strength and weakness, joy and misery, heroism and cowardice that together form the human character'" (Erdoes and Ortiz qtd. in Leonard and McClure 250). Tricksters are "moral counterexamples" (Leonard and McClure 250), and in their tales, the "innocent are as likely to suffer as the guilty" making these myths "more realistic than instructional tales usually are" (Leonard and McClure 252).

Tricksters remind us that, despite our human pretension to nobility and semidivinity, we are inseparable from our bodily urges to eat, excrete, and procreate. At the same time, the Trickster by his very transgressions celebrates and helps maintain the rules, the social structures, which are also central to what we are. And in all this contradiction, the Trickster teaches us to reach for what we desire and to laugh at ourselves when we fall short. (Leonard and McClure 253)

The trickster can be a "creator, culture-bringer, opportunist, mischief-maker, amorous adventurer, hunger-driven manipulator, credulous victim of others' tricks, lazy work avoider, transgressor, [or] clown of the body" (Leonard and McClure 252). Many familiar TV and cartoon characters are tricksters. Wile E. Coyote is a hunger driven manipulator and lazy work avoider as is Yogi Bear. Bugs Bunny is a culture-bringer, opportunist, mischief-maker, and credulous victim of others' tricks (for instance, when he is chased by Marvin the Martian). The Three Stooges are mischief makers, credulous victim's of others' tricks, and clowns of the body. Bart Simpson is an opportunist, mischief-maker, lazy work avoider, transgressor, and clown of the body. Pepe le Peu is an amorous adventurer. Mythological tricksters include Prometheus, Loki, and Satan. A human trickster in the Old Testament is Jacob, who tricks his brother out of his birthright and is tricked in turn by his uncle.