Apes and japes: Laughter and animality in the Miller’s Tale

Abstract

This article argues that the humour of The Miller’s Tale is often associated with ideas of laughter as liberating and ‘human.’ Whilst ‘humour’ is a term often applied to apparently ‘civilized’ comedy, we seem to associate the medieval with more basic kinds of laughter, often called ‘buffoonery’ or ‘mirth,’ which seem more animalistic. However, The Miller’s Tale presents complex forms of humour that contest many of our assumptions not only about medieval culture, but also about laughter and its functions. The comedy of the tale works against idealism and chivalric pomp, but rather than a humour that involves asserting the basic human state underneath all this performance, this comedy shows us how laughter plays a key role in establishing conceptions of humanity. If Chaucer’s laughter is to be considered in relation to traditions of comedy at all, it should be discussed in terms of comedy’s ideological power to establish social hierarchies, rather than as a celebration of the natural animal in us all, akin to Greek Old Comedy and buffoonery. Whilst Chaucer’s humour has been read as reflecting Bakhtinian ideas of comedy, here it is shown to be distinctly un-Bakhtinian.