Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages by Louise D’Arcens (review)

What’s so funny about the Middle Ages? Why, at the recollection of Dennis the Constitutional Peasant (Monty Python and the Holy Grail), Bill Bailey’s Pubbe Gagge (“Three fellowes wenten into a pubbe …”), or the Medieval Helpdesk (Norwegian Broadcasting), do most of us giggle? That comic medievalism is both beloved and pervasive there is no doubt, and Louise D’Arcens is right in her assertion that despite its broad appeal and its popularity as a highly useful pedagogical tool, the subject has received little critical or theoretical attention. Her goal to “move humorous medievalism out of the margins of scholarly discussion” (p. 5) will surely succeed as D’Arcens provides both analytical models for critical discourse and compelling suggestions for further research. Her primary thesis: medievalist comedy is primarily based on incongruity humor, which arises chiefly through the recognition of both temporal and cultural anachronism. This incongruity reveals a prevailing sense of ambivalence toward the Middle Ages, a time that is invoked less as a historical period than as an ideological construct against which modernity defines itself. Thus, comic medievalism betrays some of the same contradictory strains of nostalgia and repulsion, affinity and aversion that run throughout other forms of medievalisms.

Tracing a genealogy of medievalist comedy with the intention of teasing out how comedy and humor became associated with the medieval, D’Arcens examines a range of comic forms, including early modern chivalric satire (Cervantes’s Don Quixote), eighteenth-century verse modernizations of Chaucer, Victorian stage burlesque, Marxist farce (Dario Fo’s Mistero Boffo), cinema (with a focus on Monty Python), television “jocumentary” (Medieval Lives, Horrible Histories, Worst Jobs in History), and heritage tourist attractions. The persistence and pervasiveness of viewing the Middle Ages as risible suggests that comedic medievalism has provided a provocative forum for exploring anxieties about historical progress and contemporary social changes.

D’Arcens organizes her material into three broad forms of responses: we laugh at the Middle Ages for its vulgarity, superstition, and authoritarianism, and as an affirmation of our cultural progression; we laugh in the Middle Ages as we recognize cultural continuities; and we laugh with the Middle Ages as a form of subversion and resistance to hegemonic forces that continue to maintain inequity. Each of these forms of humor is largely based on the incongruity that arises from temporal and cultural anachronism.

Each chapter examines how various instances of comic medievalism make use of one or several of these tropes. Cervantes, through parody of chivalric romance in which he both deflates the high while emphasizing the indignity of the low, exposes the absurd conventions of this popular medieval genre—at the same time that he rehabilitates the genre. The chapter on Chaucer as “Joking Bard” explores how in the eighteenth century the poet became associated with “wit,” based on his satirical portraiture and antiecclesiastical satire, while some readers nonetheless remained uneasy with his apparent crudity. Victorian stage burlesque (Robin Hood, King Arthur, Joan of Arc!, Ivanhoe, and Whittington, Junior), with its combination of nostalgia and irreverence, is approached as a form of “camp historicism” (p. 94) in which “grandiose events and personages from medieval history and legend” (p. 99) are travestied while alluding to contemporary cultural and social movements. Dario Fo, an Italian actor-playwright known for his social activism and antiestablishment critique (and his receipt of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature), utilizes the pose of the jesters (giullari) or travelling players known for their criticism of the Church and aristocracy in the Middle Ages. His fluid and improvised play, Mistero Boffo, described by the Vatican as “the most blasphemous show ever transmitted on television” (Thomas Behan, Dario Fo: Revolutionary Theatre [2000], p. 2), can be seen as a modern manifestation of “medieval resistance humor” in its transgressive antiauthoritarian ethic and defense of the working classes. Here, the sense of liberation derived from Fo’s mockery of power depends upon the...