The Aesthetics of Laughter

Abstract

Everyone knows that many of Chaucer’s tales are funny; moreover, the frequent appearance of the paired terms “ernest and game” and “sentence and solace” suggests that their author knows that he and his created pilgrims are playing weighty and hilarious language games simultaneously. The presiding Host knows about the potential for “sooth” in “game and pley” and says so to the Cook (I.4355). Everyone also knows how complex the related, but not synonymous terms, laughter, humor, comedy, satire, and parody have been and still are. This chapter does not set out to untangle the scholarly debates about these categories, but looks instead at the breadth and inclusiveness of Chaucer’s distinctive humor and the aesthetic effects it evokes. It deals only with the Canterbury Tales (and relatively few of them) because I want to concentrate on comic forms, and Troilus and Criseyde, although it can be characterized in several genres, does not seem to me to qualify as comic in its generic shape. Both it and nearly all the Tales are marked, of course, by sporadic humor. For example, Cecile, on the verge of martyrdom, answers Almachius with a zinger: your vaunted power over life and death is only the power to kill, not quicken (Second Nun’s Tale [VIII.482–83]), which seems just the sudden swerve from normal expectation that identifies wit. Comment on these occasional sparks are also absent from this chapter—there are too many to do them proper justice.

The game, one would like to say, has not only rules but also a point.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Humour is a phenomenon caused by sudden pouring of culture into Barbary.

Ezra Pound, “D’artagnan Twenty Years After”

As speech is the culmination of a mental activity, laughter is a culmination of a feeling—the crest of a wave of felt vitality.

Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form

The world can never take a holiday from metaphysical first principles.

Even the raving, bolted in their cells, have not the files to file these chains away.

Gladys Schmitt, Sonnets for an Analyst

A man may seye ful sooth in game and pley.

Harry Bailly