[3.5] Dragon Compendium's Jester

[A.A.King]

Has anyone ever played a Jester? It seems to be a poorly designed class. It looks like it should be some kind Bard variant as it is given bard-like casting and very similar weapon and armor proficiency (think of rapier, whip, light armor) but it doesn't seem to get the bard's casting in light armor....

Other then the fact that the Jester turn's your otherwise annoying habit of making bad jokes into proper role-laying, does this class have any redeeming feature?

[Suteinu]

I have a character of this class made for a game that never got played. He was a derro, based very much on Groucho Marx. I'll try to get him into a game, 'cause I'd like to see how he handles, too. This class, along with the Urban Druid (and the urbane Druid, see Cityscape) really ought to have handbooks themselves ... or at least pamphlets.

[Doctor Awkward]

It's... odd...

Inspiring Quip is neat early on, but meaningless later as the bonus doesn't scale with level.
Buffoonery- Being able to make anyone within 30 feet of you roll a Will save vs being flat-footed until you say otherwise (with a new save each round for immunity) is also a neat ability, especially since it's a free action to maintain it every round.

Pretty much everything else he does is mind affecting, so anyone with access to mind blank basically shuts down all of his non-spell class features. A ton of them are also language-dependent, which is a very weird restriction, but that is a non-issue after level 7 because Tongues is on his class spell list, the downside is this means that any target without a language, and non-intelligent enemies, is also immune.
Taunt has very confusing wording. It looks like if the victim is able to charge then he must do so, but if he is unable to charge he still must move towards the jester, but can choose to do so in such a way that avoids attacks of opportunity, or can simply choose to stop if someone is blocking his path, but it doesn't say if his round is over if he stops or not. Like, can I stop because I don't want to try and walk around the crusader, and then punch the mage right next to him? or do I have to spend every action trying to reach the jester? Who knows?

But speaking of spells, it's actually not a bad list. The lower levels are a weird mix of cleric and wizard spells, and he gets a lot of the same spells bard gets, with a couple gems like Color Spray and Sleep when they are still relevant.
Glitterdust is nice. The "image" line is nice. There's Minor Creation at 4th level. He gets Hold Monster at 4th level (so level 10), but not Hold Person, which is, again, weird. He also gets Bestow Curse at level 10, which two levels earlier than his class feature that does the same thing, but for smaller numbers and is mind-affecting.
There's also a couple of things he gets later than a bard does. Undetectable Alignment is 2nd level for him, but 1st level for a bard. Tongues is a higher level too, and Break Enchantment. There's actually not too much he can do that a bard can't also do, but sooner.
Note that, by RAW, even though the jester is proficient with light armor he still suffers arcane spell failure, since he lacks the casting exception that a bard has. Probably an oversight, since his proficiency is otherwise cut-and-pasted from bard, but who knows?

It's a definitely not a good class, but comes off more sloppy than purposefully weak.
I'd clean up the spell list to gank it for use on another class, but I probably wouldn't play with any of this out of the box.