Laughing Histories

From the Renaissance Man to the Woman of Wit

Joy Wiltenburg

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000593617
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Geschichte
• Thema: Sozialgeschichte

Laughing Histories breaks new ground by exploring moments of laughter in early modern Europe, showing how laughter was inflected by gender and social power.

"I dearly love a laugh, " declared Jane Austen's heroine Elizabeth Bennet, and her wit won the heart of the aristocratic Mr. Darcy. Yet the widely read Earl of Chesterfield asserted that only "the mob" would laugh out loud; the gentleman should merely smile. This literary contrast raises important historical questions: how did social rules constrain laughter? Did the highest elites really laugh less than others? How did laughter play out in relations between the sexes? Through fascinating case studies of individuals such as the Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini, the French aristocrat Madame de Sévigné, and the rising civil servant and diarist Samuel Pepys, Laughing Histories reveals the multiple meanings of laughter, from the court to the tavern and street, in a complex history that paved the way for modern laughter. ?

With its study of laughter in relation to power, aggression, gender, sex, class, and social bonding, Laughing Histories is perfect for readers interested in the history of emotions, cultural history, gender history, and literature.

1 LAUGHTER AND POWER The Politics of Laughter

DOI: 10.4324/9781003247517-2

Figure 1.1 Margaret of Austria as a widow, portrait by unknown artist

Source: KHM-Museumsverband

One day in 1576, Agrippa d’Aubigné shared a laugh with the future King Henry IV of France, in a scene packed with themes of high and low, power and subordination. Aubigné was on the road with Henry, then King of Navarre, when they stopped to eat at a village. The king felt the urge to relieve himself and took the opportunity to defecate into a hamper. But the hamper’s owner, an old peasant woman, was incensed. While he was in the very act, she rushed at him with a billhook (a sharp-edged agricultural tool) “and would have split his skull” if not prevented by Aubigné himself. For Aubigné, the incident was comic, even though he claimed, half-seriously, that he had saved the king’s life. To make Henry laugh, he composed a mock epitaph, suited to the occasion if the king had died “such an honorable death”: “Here lies a king, o wondrous end,/Who died, as God permitted,/Of a billhook thrown by an aged crone,/As in her hutch he shitted.”¹

This incident raises a host of questions about the role of laughter in relations of power. The scene gives us extremes of status from top to bottom, and of humor from the lower bodily function to linguistic wit. The appropriation of the hamper—clearly a valued item of the peasant’s property—for such a defiling use underlined the extreme assumption of superiority by the king and his retinue. Clearly, Henry was in open view, the old woman’s presence troubling only because she wielded a weapon. Here, in the sixteenth century, we are in the “before” stage of Elias’s civilizing process, when such bodily functions were not rigorously hidden. But covering someone or their goods with shit was still offensive, as the woman’s reaction shows. In practical terms, of course, it created a disgusting mess. The hamper was a storage vessel for food, adding the implication that she and her family should eat shit. The action effectively placed the woman and her possessions below the level of the king’s excrement.

The anecdote offers food for thought in relation to Mikhail Bakhtin’s seminal work on the power of popular laughter. In his view, laughter that lampooned the messy workings of the body was a strong force in symbolically disrupting the hierarchy and dignity of the established order. But Aubigné shows a side of scatological humor that is very different from the equalizer celebrated by Bakhtin. Here the excrement intensifies hierarchy; the king’s messy body offers just one more mode of degrading his inferiors. Of course, the comedy is enhanced by other elements of the social contrasts as well. The peasant is not only lowly but female; not only female but old; not only old and female, but violently angry. The rage of women, presumed to be impotent, is a long-lived comic stereotype. It appeared in medieval drama, such as in the character of Noah’s shrewish wife, and has survived into modern times in the cartoon image of the wife chasing her husband with a frying pan or rolling pin. In this incident, we may well doubt whether the woman was really as violent as Aubigné claims; in fact, readers are probably not meant to take her very seriously as a threat. The incident was “not worthy” of inclusion in Aubigné’s larger historical work on the period, but only figured as an anecdote in the personal account of his own life that he wrote for his children. We do not know either whether she was what we would call old—what would that have meant to the youthful king and his entourage? Henry and Aubigné were both in their twenties at the time. But her age, her sex, and her improvised weapon made her extra funny.

These themes provide the jumping-off point for exploring laughter and power. Is laughter subversive, overturning the status quo? Or does it serve the masters, reaffirming their authority? We can find laughter operating in both these modes, a slippery tool indeed. We look first at laughter from below, which has inspired pathbreaking work from cultural historians. Looking at a range of evidence, we consider some perennial questions: is the laughter an effective weapon, or is it a “safety valve” that disperses potential rebellion into frivolity? How can we tell when laughter is truly “popular”? Turning to laughter at the heights of official power, we consider the laughter of rulers and diplomats. Of course, on one level they laughed as everyone does; but they also mobilized laughter in distinctive ways for political purposes—leading to its appearance in political records. The theme of laughter’s power continues throughout this book, but the issues raised by laughter in the traditional realm of public power—of rule, subordination, class, and political rivalry—invite us to consider a central question: how powerful was laughter really?

Laughter from Below

The first work to draw wide attention to the historical power of laughter was written not by a historian but by the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin argued that Gargantua and Pantagruel, masterwork of the Renaissance icon François Rabelais, was not just a literary classic but a window into the elusive world of popular culture and especially popular laughter. Two features of Bakhtin’s argument have broader importance for historical views of the power of laughter. The first has to do with the particular type of laughter. Bakhtin celebrated the laughter of popular festivity, especially carnival, the mad season of license that preceded the sobriety of Lent. The second has to do with who was laughing and at whose expense. For Bakhtin, the belly laugh of Rabelais was the laugh of the masses of ordinary people, and it symbolically dethroned the proud elites above them.²

The “carnivalesque” laughter of popular celebration, in turn, had two main ways of subverting the orderly world of social hierarchy. One was the playful theme of inversion, turning the world upside down so that nothing is as it ought to be. The comic possibilities were vast—fish swimming in the air, husband and wife reversing their roles, a boy officiating as a mock bishop, a peasant honored as king. The masking and revelry of carnival offered many opportunities for changing identities and reversing high and low. Inversion appeared in many guises in public entertainment as well, from stage to song to popular print. Inversion was funny, overturning expectations with its absurd reversals of the norm. It also played fast and loose with the serious and the sacred.

A related and overlapping ground of popular laughter was what Bakhtin called the grotesque body. Rabelaisian laughter is full of untamed bodies and their orifices: gorging, swilling, vomiting, farting, pissing, shitting, coupling, even giving birth, all became part of the raucous comedy. The characters’ monstrous excess, in gigantic size and in the scale of their disorderly behaviors, marked them as grotesque. Bakhtin saw a liberating symbolism in the shared bodily experience of humanity—birth, death, digestion, excretion, sex—all in their way disgusting, all unavoidably human, all matter for carnivalesque laughter. The laughs at excrement and other fleshly functions, in Bakhtin’s analysis, marked the “uncrowning” of social superiors by the reminder of their shared and absurd physicality. For Bakhtin, such popular humor marked a space of freedom—if only in the imagination—that he saw as suppressed and stunted in modern bourgeois society.

But was popular laughter really subversive, or was it merely a diversion that helped reconcile the lowly to their position in the status quo? The imagined inversions were fun, but their humor depended on recognition of the normal state of things: kings and nobles ruling over peasants, husbands ruling their wives, bishops processing with suitable pomp, fish swimming in the sea and not the sky. Carnival was temporary. On the other hand, the daring license of festivity was not always kept within bounds. When real rebellion did erupt, the laughter and irreverence could undermine the everyday awe that elites hoped to maintain. Another question: were the unruly laughers really the downtrodden masses? Rabelais had an elite university education, after all, and the wealthy claimed their own part in carnival festivities. It was they who could afford the best costumes for masquerades and fund the best revels. Carnival was imprinted with Christian meanings and could be orchestrated by authorities (though they could not always control it). Even when carnival play shifted into real unrest, it was not necessarily the lower classes who got out of control. Carnival laughter does not yield its meaning easily.³

Laughter and Subversion

Possibly the most famous subversive laughter in history was uncovered by the brilliant Robert Darnton in his book The Great Cat Massacre. It was late in the 1730s, in the Parisian print shop of a lazy bourgeois master and his cat-loving wife. Creeping capitalism had blocked advancement in the printing industry to a few fortunate owners. Employees still had the old guild titles of apprentice and journeyman, but in fact were largely treated as casual labor, without any prospect of eventually becoming master printers and opening their own workshops. They thought the master printer ought to be a coworker, but he had become part of a separate, leisured class that slept late, ate fancy dinners, and kept pampered pets. When told to get rid of the howling alley cats that kept the master and mistress awake at night (skipping a couple of steps in the story here), the workers staged a carnivalesque massacre. Starting with the mistress’s favorite, they slaughtered cats in an atmosphere of high revelry. According to the worker who retold the event in his life story, it roused irresistible laughter among the workers, not only at the time but in reminiscences. It was told and retold, raising hilarity every time.⁴

As Darnton has noted, the story may not have happened just as it was recounted. The semi-autobiographical account of the printer Nicolas Contat was full of embellishment, but it tells us a great deal about the workers’ outlook. Darnton found many layers of meaning in their laughter, which celebrated a moment of vicarious attack on the master and mistress themselves. The workers drew on the resources of popular culture, in which symbolic role reversals and innuendos from the sexual to the supernatural were in constant play. With inversion and symbolism, they could call the mistress a whore and witch, the master a cuckold—all while pretending that they were merely following their instructions to get rid of those pesky cats. The workers’ derisive laughter was not revolutionary; it did not change their objective situation. Yet it made them happy in the hilarious moment. No longer victims, they could celebrate their own power. As Darnton points out, their rebellious outlook shows a kinship with the real revolutionary upheaval that was to come half a century later.

The cat massacre was the most dramatic moment in Contat’s account. It was far from the only laughter, though. Contat depicts a workers’ culture in which laughter was a constant and even required element of belonging and group identity. The cat episode is sandwiched between other occasions of laughter—not all of it rebellious, but all positioning laughter as a source of power. It was laughter that exerted the power of the group over individual members, as well as laughter that marked the community of its participants. In the first instance, the unhappy apprentice Jerome became the butt of his coworkers when they found and read aloud a letter from his uncle that repeated the words, “I told you so, Jerome!” The workers were amused by all the old uncle’s criticism and advice, but “I told you so, Jerome” caused explosions of laughter. The phrase became a catcall and nickname, loudly echoing through the shop—a hundred times a day, Contat tells us.⁵ (Even the cat massacre only got 20 repetitions.)

Such hazing may seem unsurprising treatment of a young and vulnerable new apprentice. But everyone was fair game. When the print workers gathered for sociability and solidarity, ridicule was de rigeur. In speeches of mock formality, they made fun of one of their number—taking care not to attack honor or reputation, but telling funny stories, with the greatest applause for the most successful satire. As in the modern “roast,” etiquette required that the object of ridicule take it all in good part. Even though he was expected to feel chagrin (dépit), “nevertheless, to merit the esteem of his comrades, he must never get angry and must laugh with the others; if he does otherwise, he will be seen as unworthy of the amusements and society of the printers.”⁶

The massacre of cats was not the last laughter at the expense of the beleaguered bourgeois master, either. After their exploit with the cats, Jerome and his friend Léveillé decided to do something about their inadequate meals. Taking their skimpy meat ration to the grocer’s, they had it weighed. The grocer’s shop was a public space, and the customers there were quick to joke about the master’s kind care in preserving his employees from indigestion. Now the master printer was the target of community ridicule. He had been slow to see the insults implied in the cat massacre, but this damage to his reputation m...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Introduction: Laughter and Early Modern Europe
• 1 Laughter and Power: The Politics of Laughter
• 2 The Laughter of Aggression: Benvenuto Cellini
• 3 The Laughter of Social Bonding: Felix Platter
• 4 Laughter, Gender, and Sex: Dorothy Osborne
• 5 Courtly Laughter: Madame de Sévigné
• 6 Laughter and the Rising Man: Samuel Pepys
• 7 Laughter as Social Commodity: Hester Thrale and Friends
• Coda: The Lessons of Laughter
• Bibliography
• Index