Laudator Temporis Acti

Sebald Beham (1500-1550), A Couple of Fools (British Museum, accession number 1892,0628.185): Margaret A. Sullivan, "Fools/Folly," in Helene E. Roberts, ed., Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography, Vol. 1 (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998), pp. 331-336 (at 331):

When a bladder is substituted for the traditional bauble, as in Hans Sebald Beham's small print (circa 1530) of a male fool seated on the ground next to a female fool, its phallic shape emphasizes his inability to control his sexual appetites, a failing that further associates the fool with animals. Grotesque features such as a big nose, large lips, crossed eyes, or some other deformity that is the antithesis of a desirable physiognomy also characterize the imagery of the fool and are used to mark the fool as a deviant.

Charles Zika, The Appearance of Witchcraft: Print and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Europe (2007; rpt. London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 76-77 (notes omitted):

Murner's image, for instance, probably alluded to contemporary use of the German word for pot or cauldron, Hafen or Häfelin, for the vagina. The association was not just limited to language, but also related to communal practices. On the feast of St. John in southern Germany, for instance, unmarried women would hang from the eaves of their houses small pots filled with rose petals, with a burning candle inside. The pot symbolized the vagina and so the hanging of these pots at mid-summer marked a woman's sexual fertility and availability. It is not surprising, therefore, that the pot, vase or vessel was frequently used pictorially to represent female sexuality, most graphically and obviously so in a small engraving of Two Fools by Sebald Beham, in which a phallic stick held by the male fool is matched by the vessel held by the female.

John H. Astington, Stage and Picture in the English Renaissance: The Mirror up to Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 103:

The print shows a male and female fool sitting facing each other, drinking. They both wear the traditional headgear of the Brant tradition, and their lascivious interest each in the other is signalled not only by their poses, each leaning forward, but by the prominent left foreground detail of the phallic 'bauble' the male figure holds in his right hand, made of leather or cloth, and stuffed to take on its characteristic shape, not unlike the ancient costumes worn by Greek actors in comedies. The flies around the heads of the two figures are symbols of their corruption, animality, and empty-headedness. The drinking vessels — the flask held by the man, with its projecting spout, and the prominently shaded mouth of the flagon in the right lower foreground, at the same level as the woman's thighs — further symbolise the lechery of the encounter ...