History of Laughter

I read recently, Colin Jones, ‘Presidential Address: French Crossings: II. Laughing Over Boundaries’, TRHS Vol XXI (2011). It got me thinking: what’s the hardest history to write about?

Comparisons of different types and styles of history are usually purview of university students. The Modern historians mock the medievalists for their lack of primary sources; the medievalists mock the modernists for their failure to make a decision about what they think…ever; and both sets look at the ancient historians with abject pity. The arguments that rage over single lines of poetry or the meaning of a ‘winnowing fan’ in the leather wall papered studies of the scholars of Homer and Juvenal are difficult to comprehend, but do not take more than a quick study of the material and the patience to turn it endlessly on the spit.

Historians of particular countries are always so wrapped up in the minutiae of their nations that they never look too far past their limited horizons. The parochial sources that they end up swimming through become heavy and thick with garden fence intrigue all too quickly. The regional discussions on ancient families devolve into an historical soap opera all too quickly.

Marxist historians and post modernists, really any philosophical tenet that’s held onto too hard is a road to disaster. The source material is looked at through lenses coloured by too many clever men with nothing to do than make up rules for the handling of evidence. Everything is valid, nothing is valid, society is about resource, society is about gender; they miss the bigger picture as soon as they restrict themselves this way.

The best history at the moment seems to be the hardest history to write about: the history of humour. Humour relies on context more than any other human experience. What makes us laugh in London may make us quizzical in Lima and downright cross in Lisbon. It takes a complete understanding of the period, of the culture, to start to piece together the history of humour. The jokes we hear from history are not funny to us now as we need that connection to understand them. Historians of humour and analysis of laughter give us what the histories above do not, a snapshot, if ever so brief, into the past and a slight flicker, not just of the past, but of its soul.

 

PS – I recommend the article.

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