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The History of Humor. By Don L. F. Nilsen and Alleen Pace Nilsen. Some Historical Advertisements. Humor in Gothic Cathedrals. Notre Dame Cathedral is on the Isle de la Cité in Paris France. At the entrance is the sculpture of a beheaded Christian martyer holding his own head.
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The History of Humor By Don L. F. Nilsen and Alleen Pace Nilsen
Humor in Gothic Cathedrals Notre Dame Cathedral is on the Isle de la Cité in Paris France. At the entrance is the sculpture of a beheaded Christian martyer holding his own head. Winchester Cathedral is a Gothic Cathedral in England. In the rafters is the Winchester Imp, placed there by the masons, and smiling down on the congregation below.
Classical Graffiti & Ironic Oratory In ancient Greece and Rome, there are examples of graffiti, many of which are very funny. Classical Oratory also contained many examples of Irony, Paradox, Parody, and Ridicule.
The History of Comedy • Greek comedies were often bawdy or ribald and ended happily for everyone. • To Chaucer, Shakespeare, and other writers of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, a comedy was a story (but especially a play) with a happy ending, whether humorous or not.
Homer (9th-8th Century BC) • Aristotle’s Poetics, includes Homer in his discussion of the comic: • “A poem of the satirical kind cannot indeed be put down to any author earlier than Homer; though many such writers probably there were.” • But from Homer onward, many instances of the comic can be cited.
Old Comedy, Middle Comedy and New Comedy • Old Comedy of the 6th & 5th Centuries BC often made fun of a specific person and of current political issues. • Middle Comedy of the 5th & 4th Centuries BC made fun of more general themes such as literature, professions, and society. • New Comedy of the 4th & 3rd Centuries BC usually revolved around the bawdy adventures of a blustering soldier, a young man in love with an unsuitable woman, or a father figure who cannot follow his own advice.
Aristophanes (c450-c388 BC) • Of the Old and Middle comedies, the only ones that have survived complete are eleven plays of Aristophanes. • The Clouds lampoons Socrates in heaven, in the Old tradition, while Lysistrata makes fun of human nature in general. • In Plutus both the wealth and the poverty in Athens are personified. The citizenry are so distracted that they neglect the gods. • Plutus is considered to be Middle comedy.
Titus Maccius Plautus (c254-184 BC)Plubius Terentius Terence (185-c159 BC) • Comedy in the Roman Empire is generally reduced to the works of Plautus and Terence, the former of whom lived at about the same time as Menander, the latter about a century later. • Both Plautus and Terence wrote plays of the old Greek sort—farces involving the same stock characters (father, soldier, slave) and which, unlike the plays of Aristophanes, offended no one in particular.
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) • Most of Dante’s “The Divine Comedy” is not at all funny. • It is about “Paradiso” as contrasted with “Purgatorio” and the “Inferno.” • It was called a comedy because it is a story about the powerless vs. the powerful, or the little man vs. the big man, or even about the perils and pitfalls of social pretence. • And thus, “The Divine Comedy” was indeed a “comedy” only in the classical sense of the word.
The Inferno, the first installment of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, describes damned souls engaging in bawdy behavior and word play. • The second and third installments of The Divine Comedy are however distinctly not funny, and demonstrate that in the fourteenth century a comedy need do nothing more than end happily.
Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) • Boccaccio’s Decameron is a collection of stories told by a group of ten nobles who have fled the Black Death by shutting themselves up in a lonely castle. • Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were influenced by Boccaccio’s Decameron, and they have basically the same structure.
Geoffrey Chaucer (c1342-1400) • In the Middle Ages, the farces, bawdies, and satires of Greek and Roman literature continued to be popular. • Chaucer is best known for his Canterbury Tales, some of which (e.g. The Miller’s Tale) are both bawdy and still funny by today’s standards.
Chaucer also penned The Romaunt of the Rose, a satire on love and courtship, and The House of Fame which seems to spoof Dante’s idea of the narrator and the guide. • In Chaucer’s version, the narrator would rather not listen to the guide.
Erasmus (1466-1536) • Erasmus has very clear political and religious objectives in The Praise of Folly, where Folly is nursed and instructed by Self- Love, Flattery, Intemperance, and a number of other personified sins, and goes on to criticize the Catholic Church. • These personified characteristics are what made this piece allegorical. • Oddly enough, the joke was on Erasmus, who was a staunch Catholic, but whose work became a major catalyst of the Protestant Reformation.
François Rabelais (c1483-1553) • Rabelais published a series of five books collectively known as Gargantua and Pantagruel. • Gargantua and his son Pantagruel are two giants of unfixed size, who can sometimes fit into a normal building and sometimes hold whole civilizations inside of their mouths.
These books contain satires on the Roman Catholic church, bawdy stories, and scatological humor as well as plain silliness that reminds the modern reader of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. • Rabelais’ brand of silliness and freedom from the laws of physics and of logic was discussed by the critic Bakhtin, who calls this atmosphere the ‘carnival’ world.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) • Shakespeare’s plays are sometimes divided into Comedy, Tragedy, and History. • The history plays are, obviously, those based on historical personages such as Richard III and Henry IV. • The difference between comedy and tragedy is still very much the same as in Greek plays—comedies have happy endings and tragedies have sad ones; tragic heroes are larger than life, while comic heroes are flawed.
Shakespeare’s comedies are also usually funny, but unlike the Greek bawdy plays and satires, their humor lies in word play—puns, allusions, and double-entendres that are very often lost on today’s audience. • Careful perusal of an annotated version of Love’s Labours Lost or All’s Well That Ends Well will reveal the surprising density of jokes in these plays, which are supposed to have had Elizabethan audiences roaring with laughter.
Falstaff, a great comic and humorous character demonstrates Bakhtin’s “carnival.” • Falstaff appears not in comedy plays, but in history plays--Henry IV parts I and II. • Shakespeare’s tragedies, too, often include a figure of a clown or fool. His job is not so much to provide mirth or laughter as it is to provide commentary that is sometimes satiric and very often funny.
Court Jesters from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance • During the Middle Ages, Kings’ Court Jesters were not to be in competition with the Kings. • So most often they were deformed midgets with humped backs and bug eyes. • They acted stupid to match their clothing—cap and bells, motley clothes, and pointed shoes. • Their scepters were made from pig bladders as parodies of the King’s scepter of power. • In many plays, the fool is smarter than the King, but because of his appearance he could be critical of the King and the Kingdom.
Fools During the Renaissance and Beyond • There are both foolish and wise fools in Shakespeare’s plays. • Contrast the wise fool with the dead fool (Yorrick) in Hamlet and the wise/foolish women in The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado about Nothing. • Street jugglers and street musicians came out of these Renaissance traditions. • So did England’s “Punch and Judy” shows, Italy’s “Commedia d’el Arte,” and France’s “Comedie Française.” • As well as England’s “Comedy of Humours,” and “Comedy of Manners,” and America’s ventriloquists and political cartoonists.
The Eighteenth Century • The eighteenth century saw the rise of a new kind of humorous author: the wit. • A wit is usually a person who can make quick, wry comments in the course of conversation.
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) • Swift is best known for his novel Gulliver’s Travels in which sailor Lemuel Gulliver recounts his visits to strange lands inhabited by fantastic peoples. • Gulliver’s last voyage finds him in a land where horses are the dominant species, and keep dumb, barbaric humans (called Yahoos) as beasts of burden. • This novel is a humorous reflection on the failings of civilization.
Swift’s A Modest Proposal is an essay which suggests that the problems of overpopulation and starvation in the lower classes (especially in Ireland) would be readily solved if they would eat their own children.
William Congreve (1670-1729) • William Congreve was a contemporary of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. • His The Old Batchelor (1693), The Double Dealer (1693), Love for Love (1695), and The Way of the World (1700) are all satires filled with ironies and paradoxes.
Alexander Pope (1688-1744) • While Jonathan Swift was writing satirical novels, Alexander Pope was writing satirical poetry. • Pope’s Imitations of Horace satirizes the policies of George II and Horace Walpole while imitating the form of a classical poet. • Pope’s Moral Essays are works more of ridicule than of satire, and are not considered humorous by everybody. • Pope’s most celebrated satire was named Dunciad.
Voltaire (François-Marie Arout) (1694-1778) • Voltaire dabbled in many different literary forms—from novels to plays, history, poetry, letters, and essays. • His signature wit is present in all, and some are expressly meant to be satires, especially on the Catholic church, censorship, and French civil liberties (or lack of).
Henry Fielding (1707-1754) • Tom Jones is a light-hearted tale of adventure, containing many hilarious episodes and ends happily for everyone who is deserving.
History of America http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLdQ4DUnnw4&feature=fvw
Charlotte Lenox (1720-1804) • Charlotte Lenox’s The Female Quixote tells the story of Arabella, a young woman whose only education and contact with the outside world has consisted of reading romance novels, and the adventures she has when she becomes independently wealthy and comes face-to-face with the outside world.
Jane Austen (1775-1859) • Jane Austen’s characters are simultaneously true-to-life and ridiculous. • All of her novels can simultaneously be read as scorching satires of human nature, comedies of humours and comedies of manners.
Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol (1809-1852) • Some of Gogol’s short stories like The Nose are bizarre, almost to the point where humor is lost to wonder and confusion. • In The Nose a man’s nose goes AWOL and walks about the city causing trouble.
But some of Gogol’s short stories are so dark and horrible that, while the story is most certainly a joke with a punch line, the reader is loathe to laugh. • For example, in The Overcoat a poor clerk starves himself to buy a new coat, which is stolen from him on the first night he wears it.
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) • Both Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray became enormously popular for sympathetic portrayals of eccentric characters. • There are many straightforward jokes and much satire in their novels, which can be considered comedies because they end well for almost everyone.
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) • Charles Dickens is famous for the eccentrics that he portrays in his novels. • For example, the characterizations of Silas Wegg and Mr. Venus in Our Mutual Friend make us laugh in delight at the recognition and exaggeration of a ‘type’ of person that we ourselves have met in real life.
Mid 19th Century • James Russell Lowell’s Birdofreedum Sawin said, “at any rate, I’m so used up I can’t do no more fightin’ / The only chance thet’s left to me is politics or writin’.” • On the western frontier, wise fools, con-men, and tricksters like Johnson J. Hooper’s Simon Suggs and George Washington Harris’s Sut Lovingood were employed to portray the rough and unsophisticated American as an ironic hero. Suggs was lazy and dishonest, and he knew it was “good to be shifty in a new country.”
Sut Lovingood (1814-1869 • Sut Lovingood expressed a rude racism and sexism. • He argued in favor of drinking, sex, roughhousing, and a deep mistrust of preachers, widows, and other guardians of civilization. • His freedom, joy of life, and cynicism supported the counter culture.
