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

It is a truism that nothing kills a joke faster than explanation. This situation becomes dire when the joke crosses national boundaries, languages, generations, occasions, speakers, all of those things that target jokes to their intended and knowing audience. We've all had this experience and yet, somehow, in the decade since its uploading to YouTube, the Norwegian skit Øystein og jeg (Medieval Help-Desk), with English subtitles alone, has had 5,124,763 (and counting) views. How? Why? Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages gamely rides into this anarchy and sets about bringing some analytic rigor to its examination.

Comic Medievalism has four main parts, each with two chapters. The introduction provides a crisp "set-up" by sharpening the focus from simply laughing to laughing at, with, and in the Middle Ages; noting the ubiquity of "comic representations of the medieval past"; clarifying such representations as "based on a cluster of practices, rituals, beliefs, people and events that have come to be constituted as quintessentially 'medieval'"; and nominating such representations as "a vehicle for commentary on the present as well as the past" (6). D'Arcens calls on Umberto Eco's (non-comic) The Name of the Rose to model three categories of comic medievalism: representations of the Middle Ages that are patently "risible" and provoke "a kind of modern-centric Schadenfreude" that laughs, with relief, at the past age (Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court); representations that collapse temporal distinctions, allowing us to laugh, via comic identification, in the Middle Ages (Bill Bailey's "Pubbe Gagge"); and representations where "resilient folk comedy" allows us to laugh with the Middle Ages as a form of comic resistance (Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev) (10, 11). Comic medievalism, as it whizzes through generic forms, engages periodicity through its reflections on modernity, inflects historicism by revealing the affect in our relations to past temporalities, and offers an ethico-political agenda in its grounding in social commentary.

In Chapter 1, Miguel Cervantes's The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha makes an entrance as "seminal comic forebear," and D'Arcens recognizes Cervantes's novel as having shaped "modernity's view of the Middle Ages" (25): not only through plot and character, rhetoric, and comic wattage from bathos to slapstick as the novel satirizes chivalric romance, but also through its exposé of the social effects of exactly the fanatical devotion that drives medievalism in the first place. It's this double-layered, ethical, and narrative conception that changed the form of the novel and gives Don Quixote its status as meta-medievalism. Since D'Arcens's book is developing a "genealogical account" (25), the discussion offers only a brief plot summary in order to make connections to other instances of comic medievalism—The Tale of Sir Thopas, The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), The Cable Guy (1996)—and identify some persistent features, including anachronism; verbal parody; historical mismatch; "premodern farcical and buffonic modes" (32); and a maneuver described as a "performative collapse of the dichotomy between laughing subject and comic object" (32), or ambiguity, as when Don Quixote entirely fails to distinguish between fictions and hacks Master Pedro's Moorish puppets to pieces. D'Arcens is keen to analyze what kind of humor is at work in comic medievalism, and so the discussion exposes a range of critical views that mimics the forms of comic medievalism itself. Some fix on an "epochal divide" between sophisticated "modern" forms (satire, parody, wit, irony) and premodern, "prenovelistic," popular forms devoid of "ideological, social or existential reflection," thus laughing at the Middle Ages; others rely on Mikhail Bakhtin to elevate Don Quixote's "popular-festive matrix" to a "carnivalesque logic of grotesquery and social inversion," thereby laughing in the Middle Ages; Erich Auerbach's Mimesis allows us to laugh with the Middle Ages because the social satire is (formally and necessarily) weak, since Cervantes's grand project...