The phrase "a kind of fool" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe someone who exhibits foolish behavior or characteristics, often in a somewhat lighthearted or informal context.
Example: "He acted like a kind of fool when he forgot his own birthday party."
Alternatives: "somewhat foolish" or "a sort of idiot."
Then and since, Coxey and his followers have been dismissed, to the point that people used the term "Coxey's Army" to refer to any kind of fool's errand.
He is a simpleton, though sometimes a kind of "wise fool" who delivers comeuppance to the pompous.
It is why he is so confused about the world he must live in, and why his son Guido is a kind of holy fool.
In "Roma", Mad Mickey, a kind of holy fool, mutters: "The world was sick and the more he saw the worse it got.
Laurie, by contrast, is a kind of holy fool: "His loneliness had preserved in him a good deal of inadvertent innocence; there was much of life for which he had no formula".
His sense of the sheer strangeness of things was acute; perhaps his greatest character - the lonely bachelor teacher Quartermaine, sublimely incarnated by Edward Fox in the original - is a kind of holy fool, hardly able to connect with the outer world.
The phrase "Cinderella story" in relation to sports may have gotten its biggest boost from the 1980 comedy "Caddyshack," wherein Bill Murray's greenskeeper Carl Spackler, a kind of Shakespearean fool on the links, imagines himself coming "out of nowhere" to win the Masters: "He's a Cinderella boy, tears in his eyes".
At first it is the brother's inability or refusal to behave like a grown-up that seems to be the big problem, but by the end he functions as a kind of holy fool, exposing the hypocrisy and unhappiness of everyone around him.
There was a sitcom in the 1970s called "Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em," with Michael Crawford, who you may know from "Phantom of the Opera" and "Barnum". He played this madcap character called Frank Spencer who was a kind of naive fool, really, and very much a sort of clown — he was a man who just got it all wrong.
