Note: This post contains material that, dealing with adult situations, nudity, and sex, may be offensive to some readers but is, nevertheless, an important part of the history and development of comedy.
One of the Middle Age’s contributions to the literature of humor is the fabliau (plural, fabliaux), a narrative poem, the lines of which consist, most often, of rhymed couplets of eight-syllables each. Characteristically, fabliaux are satirical in tone, and often criticize arrogance, pomposity, and greed, especially among members of the clergy and the nobility. Women are frequently lampooned as well.
Fabliaux
Fabliaux are of a ribald character, emphasizing sexual situations and bawdy behavior. Frequently, an older, jealous, and possessive husband is cuckolded, his much younger, pretty wife committing adultery because she is sexually frustrated by her spouse’s impotence or intermittent virility. The protagonist is cunning, and he or she often outwits those with better educations and higher social standings. A famous example of the fabliau is Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale,” one of the stories that make up the anthology known as The Canterbury Tales. Other, lesser known examples are “The Butcher of Abbeville,” “The Three Hunchbacks,” “The Wild Dream,” and “The Ring That Controlled Erections,” all of which appear in The Norton Anthology of Western Literature.
“The Butcher of Abbeville”
“The Butcher of Abbeville,” a 588-line poem translated by Ned Dublin, recounts the story of David, a butcher from Abbeville, France, who visits a fair in Oisemont, to buy livestock. Finding nothing he likes, he starts for home, but, as night falls, afraid of highway robbers, he asks a local deacon, Father Gautier, to rent him a room for the night. Instead, the deacon turns him away.
Intent upon avenging himself for the deacon’s rudeness, David steals one of Father Gautier’s sheep, returns to the deacon’s house, saying he has bought the sheep at the fair, and offers to share its meat with the deacon if Father Gautier will, in return, allow him to spend the night. When the priest agrees, David kills and skins the animal, sharing the mutton with Father Gautier, the deacon’s wife, and their maid, who is also the deacon’s secret mistress.
Later, at different times, David persuades both the maid and the deacon’s wife to have sex with him in exchange for the sheepskin and his promise of discretion. The next morning, David visits the deacon at church, selling the sheepskin to him. The butcher has now avenged himself three times upon Father Gautier, committing adultery with the deacon’s wife, seducing his mistress, and selling the clergyman his own stolen animal’s sheepskin.
At the priest’s house, the wife and maid argue with one another concerning which of them is the rightful owner of the sheepskin, both claiming it as her own. When he returns home, the deacon hears both parties’ stories before insisting that he himself is the rightful owner of the sheepskin, which he’s purchased from the butcher. When the maid tells him what she did to earn the hide, the deacon accuses his wife of also having had sex with the butcher.
The narrator, Eustace d’Amiens, leaves it to his audience to determine for themselves which of the three claimants has rightful title to the fleece.
“The Three Hunchbacks”
The three hunchbacks of the poem’s title are traveling minstrels; the protagonist’s husband is also a hunchback, so, all told, there are four, not three, such characters in the story.
The husband is wed to a beautiful young woman who does not like being married to him. Jealous, he maintains a wary watch upon her. They seldom have visitors except for the purposes of business, but the husband allows the traveling hunchbacks to spend one night under his roof. The next day, the minstrels leave, and the husband keeps watch on his house from a bridge over the canal beside his residence, lest they return in secret.
The wife bids the minstrels to come back to her house so that they can sing to her. When her husband returns home unexpectedly, she hides the hunchbacks inside her spare bed’s three drawers. Her husband doesn’t stay long, but, when his wife opens the drawers to release the hunchbacks, all three are dead.
Revealing only one of the hunchback’s corpses, she hires a passing porter to assist her, and he dumps the body into the canal. While he is about this task, the wife removes another hunchback’s body, and, when the porter returns to collect the fee she’s agreed to pay him, she says he’s only pretended to dispose of the hunchback’s body. As proof of her claim, she shows the porter the second hunchback‘s corpse.
Supposing the dead hunchback to be “the Antichrist,” the porter lugs it to the canal. Upon his return, the wife plays the same trick on the porter, passing off the third hunchback’s body as that of the first. Believing himself bewitched by the dead hunchback, the porter also dumps the third body into the canal, declaring that he will strike the body on its neck, should he meet with it yet again.
Returning for his fee, the porter sees the wife’s husband approaching the lady’s house. The porter strikes the husband upon the head as the hunchback with a club as the husband approaches the top of the stairs, thereby killing him. The porter dumps the body in the canal, and, afterward, receives payment from the wife.
“The Wild Dream”
In the 213-line fabliau known as “The Wild Dream,” a wife is anxious to have sex with her husband, who is returning home after having been away on business for three months.
During dinner, she gets him drunk, but, instead of becoming amorous, he falls to sleep (or passes out) soon after they retire. She sleeps, too, dreaming of a fair at which a merchant sells a variety of penises and testicles. She buys the biggest penis she can find, but when, pleased at her purchase, she slaps hands with the merchant, she accidentally awakens her husband.
She apologizes, telling him of her dream, and, as the couple hugs and kisses, he becomes erect and inquires of her what price she might have paid the merchant for an organ like his. She replies that it is too small to have interested her or any other women at the fair. However, she agrees with her husband that a real, flesh-and-blood penis, of any size, is superior even to the most gargantuan of imaginary phalli, and the couple test her theory.
The last lines of the poem identify its author, Jean Bodel, who heard the story he reports in the story as a result of the husband’s unwisely having mentioned it to a poet who was compiling an anthology of fabliaux.
“The Ring That Controlled Erections”
A poem of 50 lines, “The Ring That Controlled Erections” recounts the embarrassing dilemma of a bishop who finds a cure that’s worse than the condition (erectile dysfunction) from which he suffers.
A horseman, dismounting at a stream to bathe, removes his ring, setting it aside. When he leaves, he forgets the ring, leaving it behind.
A bishop rides by, sees light flash on the ring, and, retrieving the lost jewelry, puts the ring onto his finger. At once, he has an erection of such huge dimensions that it drags upon the ground, even when he is on horseback. His erectile dysfunction is gone, replaced by satyriasis, and, to his horror, he finds that his erection will not subside.
The bishop dispatches messengers to locate someone who can help him, and the original owner, learning of the bishop’s plight, offers to help, provided that the clergyman gives him his rings and a fee of 100 pounds.
The bishop agrees, and when he gives the man the ring that controls erections, the clergyman’s erection subsides. In a sarcastic aside, the narrator suggests that that the bishop is as glad to be rid of his temporary, and bothersome, manhood as the ring’s original owner is happy to regain his own sexual virility.
Other Fabliaux
The Middle Ages offered many other fabliaux, including “The Four Wishes of St. Martin,” in which a wife wishes that her husband were all over penises; he wishes she had as many vaginas; the wife wishes away all their sex organs; and the husband wishes them restored to their original conditions.
In “The Partridges,” a wife eats both of the partridges that her husband has killed for their supper and covers up her misdeed by claiming that she’s keeping the birds warm until their guest, the local priest, arrives. Her husband sharpens his knives so he will be prepared to carve the partridges. When the clergyman arrives, the wife again lies to cover her transgression, frightening off their guest by telling him that her husband is sharpening his knives because he intends to castrate the priest. Then, she tells her husband that their dinner guest ran away with the stolen partridges.
The titles of some fabliaux indicate the nature of their plots. Often, the titles are themselves obscene, for the incidents that they narrate are usually bawdy and, often, irreverent, sacrilegious, or even blasphemous.
Situation Comedy
Perhaps the greatest contribution to humor of contemporary times is that of the situation comedy, which is discussed in a later post.
A Handbook to Literature,10th edition, by William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman draws clear and helpful distinctions among a variety of specific types of comedy, including high comedy, low comedy, farce, burlesque, realistic comedy, sentimental comedy, romantic comedy, court comedy, the comedy of manners, the comedy of morals, the comedy of humors, the comedy of intrigue, and the comedy of situation. However, in general, the authors define comedy as “a dramatic or literary form that, . . . striving to provoke smiles and laughter, uses both wit and humor,” and contend that,
In general, comic effect arises from a recognition of incongruity of speech, action, or character. The incongruity may be verbal, as with a play on words; or bodily, as when stilts are used; or satirical, as when the effect depends upon the beholder’s ability to perceive the discrepancy between fact and pretense exhibited by a braggart. . . . Viewed in another sense, comedy may be considered to deal with people in their human state, restrained and often made ridiculous by their limitations, faults, bodily functions, and animal nature. . . . Comedy. . . has always regarded humans more realistically than tragedy and drawn its laughter or satire from the spectacle of individual or collective human weakness or failure; hence, its tendency to contrast appearance and reality, to deflate pretense, and to mock excess. . . (109-110).To simplify things, we might say that humor is whatever makes us laugh and that, in general, humorists try to effect laughter through means other than dramatic enactments of skits, whereas comedians, like comedies, usually (but not always) rely more upon such skits or other dramatic situations as the basis of their routines. In short, humorists tell jokes, whereas comedians enact them. Of course, in reality, the situation is much more complex and humor and comedy, like humorists and comedians, practice many of the tricks of their counterparts.
Next: Types of Humorous Stock Characters
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