HUMOR

Benjamin Roberts

While boating on the Rhine River near Leiden in the seventeenth century, a man on board notices a young woman in a garden house along the banks watching the river. He walks to the stern of the ship, starts to urinate in full view of the woman, and yells, " 'You don't have this.' " Without giving much thought to the matter she snaps back, " 'I've seen better' " (Roodenburg, 1997, p. 120). This is one of the many humorous anecdotes recorded in a book of jokes by the Dutch lawyer Aernout van Overbeke (1632–1674). The humor of the past reveals much about society, culture, sexuality, and male-female relations. Overbeke's anecdote suggests that Dutch women in the seventeenth century were quick-witted, that the young man (who like Overbeke belonged to the urban elite of the Dutch Republic) exposing himself was not ashamed of his jest, and that the Dutch of the seventeenth century apparently enjoyed a good dirty joke. This joke was probably told only in the company of men but in all social groups; as humor is not appropriate in all circumstances, the teller of this joke, like any modern counterpart, most likely saved it for the proper occasion. Although humor is just as much a part of human life as eating and drinking, it has constantly been influenced by religious, pedagogical, and political factors in Europe since the beginning of the Renaissance. Examination of a wide range of sources—iconographic images, literary works, moralistic writings, personal documents, satires, film, and television—reveals the development of European humor.

THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND

Humor as a social phenomenon is as old as the hills, but studying it is a relatively new research terrain for social and cultural historians. For the history of humor, the Russian medievalist Mikhail Bakhtin fulfilled a role comparable to that of Philippe Ariès in the history of childhood. Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World, published in 1965 after a twenty-five year ban in Russia, was the first study in which humor was illuminated as an essential element of the culture of carnival: carnival, which ritualized winter turning into spring, was celebrated by turning the world upside down, the pauper becoming a prince, the king a jester for a day. The culture of the Middle Ages, as Bakhtin saw it, was distinctly polarized: the official culture of the church and the educated spurned laughter, whereas the popular culture was dominated by the tradition of carnival and laughter. Aaron Gurevich, a cultural historian of the Middle Ages, found this view of medieval society an inadequate simplification of its complex cultural levels, arguing that the church and the educated were not against laughter. In his novel The Name of the Rose (1982), the Italian author Umberto Eco portrays a polarization within the medieval church. In Eco's book the monk of the Benedictine order, Jorge de Burgos, is appalled by laughter, whereas William of Baskerville, of the Franciscan order, is more mundane. As the medievalist Jacques Le Goff argues, ecclesiastical writers in the Middle Ages struggled with two viewpoints: that laughter was natural and idiosyncratic to man, and that laughter was unnatural. The latter view derived from the belief that if "Jesus, the great model for humanity, . . . never once laughed in his human life, then laughter becomes alien to man, at least to a Christian man" (Le Goff, 1997, p. 43). Petrus Cantor, a twelfth-century scholar, argued that, since Christ was born a human and was capable of laughing, his refusal to laugh must be a virtue (Verberckmoes, 1998, p. 80). Throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period, this debate was a recurrent theme for theologians and moralists.

Le Goff divides the Middle Ages into two broad periods, one of repressed laughter and one of tolerance of laughter. From the fourth century to the tenth century, for monks especially, laughter was a vice akin to idleness. To laugh was a particularly abrupt way of breaking an almost celestial silence. With the second half of the Middle Ages came greater freedom to laugh, but the church tried to control it. A parallel development was an increase in vernacular literature, an element of which was self-reflection; this self-reflection partly consisted of satire and parody. The royal courts were the first to embrace and domesticate new modes of laughter.

MODERN PERIODS: RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION

A lack of sources limits the theoretical debate among historians on laughter in the Middle Ages. This is not true of the Renaissance and early modern period. A prominent source and character in the history of humor in the late Middle Ages and early modern period is the court jester. One might say that this "stand-up comedian" in his silly attire was the court's substitute for Prozac. During carnival even friars, monks, and nuns liked to imitate these clowns. Some Italian fools at the time received interregional and international fame, such as Dolcibene, the two Gonellas, Beatrice d'Este's Diodato in Milan, Isabella d'Este's Fritella at Mantua, and Borso d'Este's Scocola at Ferrara, the last immortalized in the frescoes at Schifanoia. A primary source for humor, in addition to the many literary and iconographic references to court jesters in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance are the numerous beffa or jest books. These trick or practical joke books were especially popular around the Mediterranean region, with Florence "la capitale de la beffa" (Burke, 1997, p. 64). Some of these books included plays in which a character was made a fool of, such as Niccolò Machiavelli's La mandragola (1518) and Pietro Aretino's Il marescalco. A common setting was at the court of the duke of Mantua, where the duke requests that the master of the horse get married. The master of the horse is not attracted to women, but he pursues the wedding anyway, only to find out that his bride is a page. The beffe also included instructions for pranks, "such as making someone fall asleep at the dining table, . . . recipes for dyeing one's hair or cures for impotence" (Burke, 1997, p. 64).

Laughter came under religious scrutiny during the Counter-Reformation, when reformers tried to change the Catholic Church from within rather than break with it as the Protestants had. Many clergy and writers of conduct books criticized the beffes on moral grounds. New printed beffes became embedded in a moral story, using metaphors signifying cures, lessons, and punishments, and lost their practical-joke quality. Children had to be taught to control their laughter; the elderly often lost their control. Writers of conduct books preferred verbal jokes to pranks, as did the upper echelons in society. Peter Burke detects at the end of the sixteenth century a general restriction from partaking in humor by the clergy, women, and gentlemen, which corroborates Bakhtin's idea of the polarization of humor, as does northern European art of the sixteenth century. Depictions of laughing faces on people of lower means often served as examples of unacceptable behavior. "Jesters, satyrs, peasants, drunks, bagpipe-players were all presumed to be the opposite of what a civilized person was supposed to be" (Verberckmoes, 1998, p. 47).

Northern European moralist writers of the Counter-Reformation also participated in suppressing verbal humor. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the pedagogical and moralistic writings by the humanists Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536), Laurent Joubert, and Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540) were influential in determining how laughter was regarded for the rest of the early modern period. Especially for Erasmus, laughter was no laughing matter. It had serious purposes, such as relieving pain caused by sickness, and he advised that it was good to laugh occasionally while in the company of others. But for other than medicinal uses, laughter was denounced. Humanistic writers understood that laughter is an exceptional form of human expression, yet at the same time were pressured to restrain it by pedagogical means. Faced with this dilemma, they tried to distinguish the real laugh from the false by categorizing the various forms of laughter. Vives described the unstoppable laugh of the Greek philosopher Democritus (c. 460–370 b.c.) as fake and unreal, a forced sardonic laugh, and Erasmus labeled it false, bitter, and foolish. Erasmus classified laughter as follows: the ionic laugh, that of the bon vivant with a taste for luxury and pleasure-seeking; the megaric laugh, or laughter at the wrong moment; the chrionic laugh, or laughter that bursts forth; and the syncronousic laugh, a laughter expressing shock that is difficult for the body to control. According to Erasmus these laughs were inappropriate for respectable people because they implied a wild spirit.

In De anima et vita (1538), Vives theorized about the effects of laughter on the body, drawing on the humor theory developed by Galen, the second-century Greek physician. According to that theory, bodily fluids—the humors—determine a person's health and temperament. Vives wrote that those with yellow bile were inclined to laugh more easily because their hearts gave off warmth, whereas those having a phlegmatic temperament and thus troubled with black bile laughed less due to their slow circulation. For Vives laughter was a natural human condition that nevertheless people should not give into easily. Conduct books advised a controlled laugh and only in appropriate situations. Laughter had a social dimension: the naive, such as peasants, children, and women, were likely to lose their self-control if laughter caught them off guard, whereas intelligent people could control themselves and not burst into laughter.

In Traité du ris (Treatise on laughter, 1579), Joubert studied the physical aspects of laughter, distinguishing real laughs from fake ones. According to Joubert's anthropological description, laughter manifested itself physically: "The face goes into motion, the mouth and lips widened, the chin extended, the eyes glistened and teared, the cheeks blushed, the chest shuck, the voice trembled." The situation became worse as the laugh continued:

The throat widens, the lips stretch even further, the face wrinkles especially the cheeks and corner of the eyes, the teeth become exposed, the eyes tear and swell as if they are going to jump out of their sockets, the veins in the forehead and neck swell, the arms, shoulders, and buttocks tremble, and one starts to stamp with their feet . . . so that one begins to cough, throw up, and the nose spits out what someone has drank, one starts to piss, shit, and to sweat. (Verberckmoes, 1998, p. 61)

In some cases, he noted, a laugh could last so long that a person must lean on something to brace himself or herself or fall down. According to Joubert, in the worst-case scenario a person could faint but not die. Damasceno, an Italian priest and astrologer in the seventeenth century, wrote a pamphlet in which he drew an interesting conclusion from humoral theory: a person's temperament could be determined by the way that person laughed. A hee-hee-hee laugh indicated a melancholic temperament, a heh-heh-heh laugh a choleric temperament, a ha-ha-ha laugh a phlegmatic temperament, and a ho-ho-ho laugh a sanguine temperament. Of course, this view of temperament was not taken too seriously, although humoral theory retained medical currency into the nineteenth century.

During the religious and political upheavals in the northern and southern Netherlands in the sixteenth century, moralistic writers of the Counter-Reformation tried to constrain laughter. Pieter Croon of Mechelen (in present-day Belgium) echoed the church's old conviction regarding laughter, writing, " 'Now is the time for weeping and in heaven will be the time for laughter' " (Verberckmoes, 1997, p. 80). Despite this stern disapproval of laughter, Croon's contemporaries were aware that laughing was part of human nature, thus it was important to restrain and control laughter as much as possible. Spiritual writers consoled their audiences with the assurance that "earthly tears would be followed by heavenly laughter" (Verberckmoes, 1997, p. 81). Reformers distinguished between sacred and profane humor, creating a whole new comic terrain. Those who made fun and folly of the church, such as "the puppet players Jacob Cobbeniers and his wife Elisabeth Lauwers, who around 1600 in a puppet play let St Peter and St Paul kiss and feel a woman, Margite, and even let the two saints embrace each other," could be tried before an ecclesiastic or secular court (Verberckmoes, 1997, pp. 84–85). Mockery of the Catholic Church was not taken lightly.

Early modern society was also aware of the psychological effects of laughter. Depressive bouts known as melancholy were a common plight of the wealthy and the idle. Toward the end of the sixteenth century melancholy was a household term. In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) the Oxford clergyman and scholar Robert Burton (1577–1640) made a scientific study of the causes and effects of melancholy, and laughter as an important remedy. Various reports claimed people died of melancholy, and numerous pamphlets were published on how to cure it. The physician known as Paracelsus (1493–1541) advised the victims of melancholy to battle it with its opposite. A melancholy patient should be treated with laughter, while a clown, on the other hand, should be handled with melancholy. The idea behind both therapies was to normalize the person's temperament. For those with severe cases of melancholy, some cures called for such unusual remedies as liquid gold or venereal ecstasy (Verberckmoes, 1998, p. 68). More commonly, doctors and others concerned were apt to recommend a good laugh now and then. The letters of the prominent Amsterdam lawyer Willem Backer (1656–1731) urged his daughter, who was plagued with melancholy, to read, paint, take walks, and see a comedy at the theater.

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Not surprisingly the elites, who were likely to fall prey to melancholy, were also the first to abide by the numerous domestic conduct books and theological treatises restraining laughter. In the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, the humor of the urban elite shifted to a more cultivated wit and punning. In Amsterdam in the late seventeenth century, for example, the society for the reform of theater rewrote comedies, purging them of their vulgar elements. This was a stark contrast to the scenes depicted by the painter Jan Steen (1626–1679), a keen observer of the human comedy. Steen's themes were everyday situations, such as seduction, lovesickness, marriage, and childbirth, as well as historical episodes from which he culled humor and wit. About Doctor's Visit (c. 1667–1670), which portrays a young, lovesick girl, the art historian Mariët Westermann writes:

The young woman perks up at the sight of the lover entering. Her accelerating pulse confounds the doctor, who signals his incompetence with his costume, outmoded for the 1660s, and with his bewildered expression. The smiling girl at the virginals and the grinning character at far right, who sports Steen's features, enhance the comic flavour. Letting us in on the joke, Steen suspends a herring [a phallic metaphor] and two onions in a farcical simile for the cure. (Westermann, 1997, p. 143)

How could Steen hope to sell his canvases, candidly depicting smoking, drinking, disorderly behavior, and sexual illicitness, to the urban elite with their high moral standards? According to Westermann, the elites saw no resemblance between themselves and Steen's round-bodied characters, nor between their own moral lifestyles and the situations he represented. Thus they could enjoy the humor without feeling morally implicated.

The sense of humor of the seventeenth-century urban elite is more clearly revealed by Overbeke's Anecdota, his book of jokes. Overbeke, who was well educated and friends with many prominent people in the Dutch Republic, recorded some 2,440 jokes and anecdotes, whose subjects included physical handicaps, women, permissive parenting, capital punishment, sex, and bathroom humor. In contrast with the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, it was acceptable to laugh at those who were physically impaired. Many jokes popular among all strata of Dutch society were childlike, with their emphasis on bodily excretions and sexual attributes. The comical situation was also popular, and some jokes along these lines were circulated into the twentieth century. For example, a dimwit ties a rope around his waist. When someone asks why, he replies, "I want to hang myself." The other remarks, "Then you have to tie the rope around your neck and not your waist." The dimwit retorts, "I already tried that but it makes me choke."

Punishment of adults in the early modern period took place in public (juveniles were often spared public humiliation) and was a form of entertainment for the masses. Overbeke's collection includes a joke about a public execution. The sentenced man has to climb the ladder to the gallows backward, to the delight of the spectators, who roar with laughter. The condemned man pardons himself to the executioner, saying, "Excuse me, this is my first time." In another, a man condemned to death by the courts is given the choice of death by hanging or by beheading. (Death by hanging was less honorable.) The man replies, "Hanging, I can't stand the sight of blood."

Many jokes Overbeke recorded were about sex, impotence, and the sex organs. People of his day freely discussed sexuality; such discussions were more restricted later in the seventeenth century. He alluded to the female genitals as "c ...,""stocking," or "slit," and to the penis as "clown," "glodhopper," "finch," "instrument," and "middle knee." Lusting women figured in many jokes. For example, after returning home following an absence a woman complains that her dog was more polite to her than her husband. When asked what she means, she replies, "At least my dog jumped on top of me." Overbeke's contemporaries were not surprised that many women became prostitutes, reasoning that such women longed for sex.

What motivated Overbeke to record the jokes of his day? His father had died from "morbo melancholico" or depression, for which humor was a well-known remedy. Another reason might have been his social background. His forefathers were from the southern Netherlands and had fled to the Dutch Republic during the revolt against Spain. Although they worked themselves up to the higher strata of Dutch society in the seventeenth century, they never belonged to the very top. Overbeke studied law at the University of Leiden, went on the grand tour, and became a lawyer in the Hague, where he was close to many high officials and members of the stadtholder's court. With his sense of humor and love of writing poetry, Overbeke was somewhat of a bohemian. He probably benefited from his sense of humor especially in high circles, where humor had an important social function. As everybody enjoys a good joke, humor serves as a good social lubricant, enlivening all sorts of gatherings. Civilized people released their physical fury through humor. Instead of fighting duels, urban society solved differences in a sophisticated fashion, replacing the sword with the tongue in contests of wit. Lawyers such as Overbeke were especially suitable for this type of linguistic warfare because they honed their wit and dry humor at trials.

In early modern France humor played an important part in the shift from physical violence to verbal retort in the civilization process. Norbert Elias (1897–1990), the father of the theory of the civilization process, never said a word about humor; nevertheless it is a fact that physical violence decreased throughout the early modern period, replaced by sophisticated humor. According to the Dutch historian Rudolf Dekker, who stumbled upon Overbeke's Anecdota in the Dutch national archives, Overbeke's record of humor and anecdotes endorses the image of the seventeenth-century Dutch as a humorous folk and illustrates a shift in the national character by the nineteenth century, when the Dutch no longer were known for their boisterous humor but rather for their sedate soberness. What happened to the image of the boisterous Dutchman slapping his knee? Beginning in the late seventeenth and continuing into the eighteenth, conduct book writers, moralists, and theologians, all influential in the Dutch bourgeois culture, condemned immoderate laughter, especially laughing at the expense of another person. In the course of two centuries the Dutch became heavy-handed Calvinists.

For early modern England Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) and the diary of Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) are important sources. Both men owned large collections of jest books, a genre popular among Italian humanists in the Renaissance; as they were translated they became popular throughout the rest of Europe. Stories in these books depicted a scene of daily life, ending with a smart reply intended to make the listener burst out laughing. Indeed, telling jokes was an amusing pastime. On 9 October 1660 Pepys wrote that he and his friends "were very merry at table, telling of tales," and a month later he wrote, "And did tell many merry stories, and in good humours were we all." Many times the affair of telling jokes was accompanied by drinking. Pepys recorded many practical jokes he played, even on William Penn. He noted ludicrous accounts, such as on 1 July 1663, "Sir Charles Sedley stripping himself naked on the balcony of a cook's shop in Covent Garden, before 1000 people, then engaging in various obscene acts, 'abusing scripture', and preaching an obscene 'Mountebank sermon' " (Brewer, 1997, p. 95). In general the educated frowned upon jest books, but apparently Pepys did not. He classified his "merry books" as "vulgaria." Because reprints were often cheaply produced, jest books were literally read to pieces by his contemporaries.

In the seventeenth century little difference existed between the humor of the gentry and of the populace. As elsewhere in Europe this changed in the eighteenth century, mainly because humanist thinkers embraced the French classicism manifested in conduct books. In 1748 Lord Chesterfield (1694–1773) condemned laughter in a letter to his son: "Loud laughter is the mirth of the mob, who are only pleased with silly things; for true wit or good sense never excited a laugh" (Brewer, 1997, p. 103). Apparently Lord Chesterfield was not one to invite to a party. Toward the end of the seventeenth century the court jester died out as well. The English king William III of Orange (1650–1702) was the last king to appoint a jester to the court in 1694. During the eighteenth century humor joined French culture, literature, language, fashion, and court in the esteem of the European elites. Especially in urban areas, people came to prefer sophisticated humor over the traditional boorish humor of rural society with its practical jokes and pranks.

THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES

In the early nineteenth century Berliners were well known for their wit. The city was acclaimed by guidebooks as the "mother city of wit," and its inhabitants were applauded for their "mockery, ridicule, bluntness and cheek." Dry wit was reputedly "natural phenomenon, an inborn characteristic of Berlin's lower classes" (Townsend, 1997, pp. 200–201). In 1844 the German author Theodor Mundt noted that Berlin's popular humor had two qualities: it could either ignite or still the frustrations of the people regarding Prussia's political situation in the 1830s and 1840s. Apparently it had a soothing effect on the populace until 1848.

According to the historian Mary Lee Townsend, Berlin humor of the early nineteenth century profoundly influenced the establishment of a public sphere with a sense of community. In that sphere laughter was an important ingredient of public debate. A comic strip figure, Eckensteher Nante, was a significant symbol. Eckensteher, literally one who stands on a street corner, first appeared in the Berlin press in 1832 to denote a lower-class worker, and by the 1848 revolution the character by that name was a major political icon. On some occasions he was even suggested as a candidate for emperor of a united Germany. Eckensteher's popularity can be credited to his wide circulation through an inexpensive medium. His social background as a menial laborer in Berlin appealed to many of the other Berliners who were drawn to the city for work. The strip addressed and satirized many social issues of early nineteenth-century society, such as poverty, drinking, and the political repression of Prussian citizens. A recurring theme concerned the Prussian state's poor care of veterans of the Napoleonic Wars. In a strip in an 1845 booklet, "an ex-soldier remarks to his friend, 'It is nice to die for the Fatherland . . . because then you don't have to live as a disabled veteran' " (Townsend, 1997, p. 212). All social strata read the strip, but each group probably found something different in it. The bourgeoisie most likely laughed at the stupidity, passiveness, and harshness displayed, while the poor probably laughed at the situations with which they identified. The strip's effect on politics was probably marginal in the long run, but it kept the political groups of Berlin on their toes up to the 1848 revolution.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, caricatures became popular in the English magazine Punch, which first appeared in 1841. The editors marketed humor that the English bourgeois middle class could appreciate. During the first nineteen years of Punch's publication, its satire poked fun at the government, the propertied classes, the Catholic Church, and the English royal family. In 1860 the editor Mark Lemon (1809–1870) decided it would be more lucrative to humor than to offend the bourgeoisie, and Punch became a polite weekly that exhibited many characteristics of the English temperament. From 1860 to after the World War II the jokes in Punch fit into a typically English pattern. In his penetrating look at English humor, Harold Nicolson describes the jokes in Punch as childish (with a naive delight in the play on words) and self-protective (ridiculing the unfamiliar, foreigners, surprising events, and intellectual superiority); they required minimal mental effort (whether appreciation of the unfamiliar, of poking fun at knowledge, or of inspired nonsense), aiming instead to comfort (by comparing dilemmas of the present with the past and thus rationalizing them). Nicolson argues that the English are not less sensitive than other nationalities when its comes to making fun of their "institutions, climate, cooking, habits and foibles" (Nicolson, 1956, p. 43). Rather, the core of the English sense of humor is a high self-regard masquerading as self-ridicule: for example, if the English were truly ashamed of their cuisine, they would not be inclined to poke fun at it.

While Punch catered to the English bourgeoisie, Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) constantly made fun of them from above. His plays, such as The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), mocked middle-class norms and values and therefore Victorian society. All the prized merits of the English bourgeoisie, such as hard work, honesty, marriage, good morals, and proper behavior, faced ridicule in Wilde's one-liners. To wit: "Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development" (Wilde, 1987, p. 1113). In fact self-ridicule became the main ingredient for humor in the film industry and later for television in twentieth-century America. Classics such as Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), which derided industrial society, and The Great Dictator (1940), which ridiculed Hitler, who had risen to power in Nazi Germany, made audiences on both sides of the Atlantic roar with laughter. Hitler, however, failed to see the humor and banned Chaplin's films. By the 1950s American situation comedies such as I Love Lucy brought American culture and the American sense of humor into European households. Europeans produced their own sitcoms, incorporating their own national identities and jokes. Most American sitcoms more or less portrayed American family values with a moralistic message and dealt with matters like sex in an indirect Victorian fashion. The popular 1990s British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous had viewers in Britain and on the Continent gasping for air at the quick-witted humor of its stars, Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley. The duo portrayed two forty-something women of the baby boom still living in a version of the hedonistic 1960s world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The candor fired off in high-speed dialogue was a refreshing element in British humor. While most viewers laughed at the mockery of the 1960s, the real butt of the humor was the no-nonsense 1990s and its New Age overtones.

CONCLUSION

From the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, moralists, theologians, and the church attempted to restrain laughter. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries attitudes toward laughter shifted. By replacing physical violence with verbal wit, the elites first initiated this social intercourse, and the bourgeoisie and the lower strata of society adopted it. Propelled by humanist pedagogical writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as Erasmus, Vives, and Joubert, the change was more apparent during the eighteenth century, when the bourgeoisie incorporated humor in their lives on a broad scale. However, the personal documents of Overbeke and Pepys, both of high social status, are closer to the humor of daily life in the seventeenth century and illustrate that people continued to laugh about commonplace matters despite finger-pointing by moralists. Sources from the Renaissance and the early modern period demonstrate that the history of humor is a dichotomy between the humor portrayed in secondary sources and the humor of daily life in personal sources. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the influence of moralists and theologians on the suppressing of humor declined. By the end of the twentieth century, a sense of humor was considered a particular asset, with employers seeking not only skills and commitment in their prospective workers but also the ability to laugh. The old adage, "Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone," survived. Another modern variable involved political regimes and uses of humor to release political tension amid censorship, a key theme for many communist countries in the twentieth century.

The social and cultural history of European humor remains a fertile topic. Specific explorations, such as examinations of early modern Holland, have been revealing and suggest important adjustments of established views. But many periods and regions have not been studied, and systematic accounts have not been developed. The difficulty of the topic lies not in discussing written efforts at humor but in deciphering what humor meant to different people and how it was used. Many studies, such as those concerning the role of political humor and satire amid censorship efforts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are specific. Analysis of new forms of popular theater, such as music halls, in the late nineteenth century inevitably deal with earthy humor and how it was received when the middle class patronized working-class establishments. Other studies refer to humor in passing. Works on changing European manners in the eighteenth century—among them Lord Chesterfield's popular treatise—note a hostility to humor, perceived as suggesting poor breeding and lack of self-control. How much this attitude actually affected humor is another question. Clearly, ample room exists for additional research in a branch of social-historical inquiry fed by the growing interest in cultural evidence and issues.

See also other articles in this section.

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