This chapter will detail the typology of the contented fool in Dutch theater and examine how s/he functioned in the popularization of antislavery sentiment. Rendered by white actors in blackface, happy-go-lucky slaves and servants were given a personality that quickly enthralled Dutch audiences, neatly articulating how they resigned themselves to their servitude. In a time when the metropole debated over fundamental equality and feared resistance in its colonies, the contented fool, even imaginary, may have impersonated a romantic idyll of Afro-diasporic people who acknowledged the semiotics assigned to their skin color. Black makeup seems to have been a key element in the creation of this performative template, which drew on novel theorizations about race that crystallized causal connections between a non-white skin, minimal intelligence, and inherent servility. It is no coincidence that such racist stereotypes appeared in productions that were in fact critical of slavery. As Jan Nederveen Pieterse has shown in his transnational study Wit over zwart, racism came to the fore in white-penned antislavery texts “as the buffer between abolition and equality.” If social boundaries between the master and the enslaved would disappear with the abrogation of slavery, racial inequality enabled the white middle classes to maintain their moral superiority. In that sense, the dispossessed Black body became an imaginative surface onto which theatergoers projected their own understanding of themselves and their dominion over people of color, both in and outside the legal frame of slavery.