Jest books (or jestbooks) are collections of jokes and humorous anecdotes in book form – a literary genre which reached its greatest importance in the early modern period.[1]

Origins

The oldest surviving collection of jokes is the Byzantine Philogelos from the first millennium.[2] In Western Europe, the medieval fabliau[3] and the Arab/Italian novella[4] built up a large body of humorous tales; but it was only with the Facetiae of Poggio (1451) that the anecdote first appears rendered down into joke form (with prominent punchline) in an early modern collection.[5]

Like his immediate successors Heinrich Bebel and Girolamo Morlini, Poggio translated his folk material from their original language into Latin, the universal European language of the time.[6] From such universal collections, developed the particular vernacular jestbooks of the various European countries in the sixteenth century.[7]

Elizabethan jestbooks

Tudor and Stuart jest books were typically anonymous collections of individual jests in English,[8] a mix of verse and prose perhaps more comparable to the latter-day magazine than to a normal book.[9] Some, however (following a German model), did attempt to link their jokes into a picaresque sort of narrative around one, often roguish hero, as with Richard Tarlton.[10] Jest books took a generally mocking tone,[11] with civility, and social superiors like the 'stupid scholar' as favourite targets.[12]

The low-life, realistic tone of the jest book, akin to coney-catching pamphlets, fed into the early English novels (or at least prose fiction) of writers like Thomas Nashe and Thomas Deloney.[13] Jestbooks also contributed to popular stage entertainment, through such dramatists as Marlowe and Shakespeare.[14] Playbooks and jestbooks were treated as forms of light entertainment, with jokes from the one being recycled in the other, and vice versa.[15]

Advances in printing meant that quantitatively jestbooks reached their greatest circulation in the 17th and 18th centuries; but qualitatively their contents was increasingly either a repetition of earlier publications or an artificial imitation of what had in the Elizabethan jest book been a genuine folk content.[16] Bowdlerisation in the 19th century completed the fall of the English-language jest book from Elizabethan vitality to subsequent triviality.[17]

Parallel traditions

  • French jestbooks were widely drawn on in the work of Rabelais.[18] Arguably at least, the French jestbook tradition survived unbowdlerised into the twentieth century.[19]
  • Germany had a rich tradition of jestbooks, with Till Eulenspiegel as a prominent character.[20]
  • The first American jest book was published in 1787, and thereafter the genre flourished for some half a century, before giving way to the twin influence of censorship and the rise of the comic almanac.[21]

See also

References

  1. ↑ G. Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1973) Vol 1 p. 27
  2. ↑ G. Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1973) Vol 1 p. 25
  3. ↑ B. Ford ed., The Age of Shakespeare (1973) p. 126
  4. ↑ G. Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1973) Vol 1 p. 26
  5. ↑ G. Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1973) Vol 1 p. 37
  6. ↑ G. Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1973) Vol 1 p. 25
  7. ↑ Jest books
  8. ↑ Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness and English Renaissance Literature (2001) p. 291
  9. ↑ B. Ford ed., The Age of Shakespeare (1973) p. 126
  10. ↑ Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness and English Renaissance Literature (2001) p. 293
  11. ↑ B. Ford ed., The Age of Shakespeare (1973) p. 72
  12. ↑ G. Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1973) Vol 1 p. 77
  13. ↑ B. Ford ed., The Age of Shakespeare (1973) p. 73 and p. 126
  14. ↑ B. Ford ed., The Age of Shakespeare (1973) p. 57
  15. ↑ M. Straznicky, The Book of the Play (2006) p. 39 and p. 58
  16. ↑ G. Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1973) Vol 1 p. 27
  17. ↑ G. Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1973) Vol 1 p. 28
  18. ↑ Jest books
  19. ↑ G. Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1973) Vol 1 p. 28 and p. 46
  20. ↑ Jest books
  21. ↑ F. Shuffleton, A Mixed Race (1993) p. 163

Further reading

  • Joseph Fliesler, Anecdota Americana (1927)
  • W. C. Hazlitt ed., Shakespeare Jestbooks 3vol (1864)
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