Joseph Andrews and the Great Laughter Debate

Joseph Andrews and the Great Laughter Debate SIMON DICKIE It is hard for modem readers to see how anyone could have laughed at the famous "roasting" scene in Book III of Joseph Andrews. At the hands of the malicious squire and his retinue, good Parson Adams is first attacked by a pack of hunting hounds and then subjected to a long series of humiliations and practical jokes. He is teased and mimicked, tumbled to the ground, scalded with soup, terrified by an exploding firecracker, and finally dunked in a great tub of cold water. Coming immediately after Joseph's speech on charity, the episode seems like the clearest possible illustration of human cruelty. It reflects Fielding's recurring concern, in many writings of this period, with the nature and ethics of laughter. Almost too obviously, it refers us back to the novel's well known preface, with its careful distinctions between justified corrective humor and malicious delight at the sufferings of others.1 Joseph's reflections on charity seem like a set of instructions to the reader: though there was little genuine kindness in the world, he muses, anyone who scoffed at true goodness "would be laughed at himself, instead of making others laugh" (182-3).2 The squire himself is ostentatiously introduced as a negative example, with a lengthy analysis of his vices; he is suitably punished when Adams drags him into the tub after him (212, 196). Fielding makes the clearest possible parallel between the hunting dogs that first attack Adams and the roasting squire with his band 271 272 / DICKIE of "two-legged Curs" (186, 191). Moreover, Fielding seems careful to prevent readers from finding any of this amusing: he goes to some trouble, for example, to indicate that his information is incomplete. Adams himself can't remember everything that happened, and the narrator has his information only second hand, "from a Servant of the Family" (192). But these satiric aims, as every Fielding scholar knows, were entirely lost on most of his contemporaries. They delighted in the squire's pranks, as Sarah Fielding complained, failing to see that "the ridiculers of parson Adams are designed to be the proper objects of ridicule (and not that innocent man himself)." It was almost impossible to convince readers that an eccentric idealist like Adams was not a figure of contempt. Most fixed their thoughts on his oddities of dress and behavior or "the hounds trailing the bacon in his pocket," entirely overlooking "the noble simplicity of his mind, with the other innumerable beauties in his character."3 And this sort of mistake—if that is the right word—is typical of early interpretations of the book as a whole: to a vast majority of its initial readers, Joseph Andrews was a farcical and irreligious book. Many simply ignored its claims to ethical and literary seriousness, delighting in its farcical brawls, beatings, and bawdy incidents at coaching inns. To its harsher critics, Joseph Andrews was an irremediably "low" text, continually degenerating into "wretched Buffoonery and Farce."4 Parson Adams, Fielding's "Character of perfect Simplicity," was widely regarded as a figure of fun—a hilariously absentminded old parson and the deserving victim of so many violent pranks. Graver still, Fielding's treatment of Adams amounted to a wholesale mockery of religion: in this "dry unnatural Character," wrote one critic, Fielding had "ridicul'd all the inferior Clergy."5 Even the novel's more sympathetic readers saw the parson as little more than a particularly welldrawn comic eccentric, a figure of "gay contempt" as Arthur Murphy put it.6 How could so many get a text so wrong? And why, more importantly, did Fielding, by then an extremely experienced and savvy literary producer, so seriously misunderstand his audience? Modem critics, like Fielding's contemporary defenders, have usually put it down to ignorance or malice. The early readers of Joseph Andrews, so the argument goes, were either unable to separate Fielding from his reputation as a producer of low farces, or they were political enemies determined to find fault with whatever he produced. But an interpretation favored by a vast majority of contemporaries—and one that prevailed for more than a century...