History of English Humour, Vol. 1: With an Introduction upon Ancient HumourL'Estrange, A. G. K. (Alfred Guy Kingan)
Philosophy
History of English Humour, Vol. 1: With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour
L'Estrange, A. G. K. (Alfred Guy Kingan)
English wit and humor -- History and criticism; Wit and humor -- History and criticism
represented on the pews, from a pair of scissors to a man-of-war,
including a cook holding a sheep by the tail. It was only a step from
this to introduce humour, and as men's feelings had not then been
chastened or brought into order by reflection, they probably overlooked
the lowering tendencies of levity. Those who came to laugh, might remain
to pray, and so a strange crop of incongruities germinated upon the
sacred soil. Thus, in Beverley Minster, we have a monkey riding upon a
hare--a bedridden goat, with a monkey acting as doctor; and at
Winchester a boar is playing on the fiddle, while a young pig is
dancing.[47] Even scenes of drunkenness and immorality are not always
excluded. But the principal representations attributed human actions to
birds and beasts--people who could laugh at stories of this kind, could
also at depictions of them. It may be maintained that men were then
highly emotional, and demanded but little complexity or truth in humour,
so that they could see something amusing in a boar playing upon the
bagpipes, or in such a device as a monster composed of two birds, with
the head of a lion, or another with a human head on a lion's body! But
there must have been something more than this--some peculiar estimation
of animals to account for such numerous representations. They were
common in the secular ornamentation of the day, for instance, in a MS.
copy of Froissart of the fifteenth century, there is a drawing of a pig
walking upon stilts, playing the harp, and wearing one of the tall
head-dresses then in fashion.
This love of the comic seems to have been fostered by the leisure and
the lively turn of some ecclesiastics. In the injunctions given to the
British Church in the year 680, no bishop is to allow tricks or
jocosities (ludos vel jocos) to be exhibited before him, and later we
read of two monks, near Oxford, receiving a man hospitably, thinking he
was a "jougleur," and could perform tricks, but kicking him out on
finding themselves mistaken. We find some of the monks amusing
themselves with "cloister humour," consisting principally of logical
paradoxes; while others indulged in verbal curiosities, such as those of
Tryphiodorus, the lipogrammatist, who wrote an Odyssey in twenty-four
books without once using the letter A. Some were more fond of pictorial
designs, and carved great figures on the chalk downs, such as the Giant
of Cerne Abbas, in Dorsetshire, and the Long Man of Wilmington, in
Sussex.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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