Jest books (or
joke books) are collections of
jokes and humorous anecdotes in book form – a literary genre which reached its greatest importance in the early modern period.
[G. Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1973) Vol 1 p. 27]
Origins
The oldest surviving collection of jokes is the Byzantine
Philogelos from the first millennium.
[G. Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1973) Vol 1 p. 25] In Western Europe, the medieval
fabliau[B. Ford ed., The Age of Shakespeare (1973) p. 126] and the Arab/Italian
novella[G. Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1973) Vol 1 p. 26]
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.
[G. Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1973) Vol 1 p. 37]
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.[G. Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1973) Vol 1 p. 25] From such universal collections, developed the particular vernacular jestbooks of the various European countries in the sixteenth century.[ Jest books]
Elizabethan jestbooks
Tudor and Stuart jest books were typically anonymous collections of individual jests in English,
[Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness and English Renaissance Literature (2001) p. 291] a mix of verse and prose perhaps more comparable to the latter-day magazine than to a normal book.
[B. Ford ed., The Age of Shakespeare (1973) p. 126] 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.
[Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness and English Renaissance Literature (2001) p. 293] Jest books took a generally mocking tone,
[B. Ford ed., The Age of Shakespeare (1973) p. 72] with civility, and social superiors like the 'stupid scholar' as favourite targets.
[G. Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1973) Vol 1 p. 77]
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.[B. Ford ed., The Age of Shakespeare (1973) p. 73 and p. 126] Jestbooks also contributed to popular stage entertainment, through such dramatists as Marlowe and Shakespeare.[B. Ford ed., The Age of Shakespeare (1973) p. 57] Playbooks and jestbooks were treated as forms of light entertainment, with jokes from the one being recycled in the other, and vice versa.[M. Straznicky, The Book of the Play (2006) p. 39 and p. 58]
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 era jest book been a genuine folk content.[G. Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1973) Vol 1 p. 27] Bowdlerisation in the 19th century completed the fall of the English-language jest book from Elizabethan vitality to subsequent triviality.[G. Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1973) Vol 1 p. 28]
Parallel traditions
-
French jestbooks were widely drawn on in the work of Rabelais.
[ Jest books] Arguably at least, the French jestbook tradition survived unbowdlerised into the twentieth century.[G. Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1973) Vol 1 p. 28 and p. 46]
-
Germany had a rich tradition of jestbooks, with Till Eulenspiegel as a prominent character.
[ Jest books]
-
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.
[F. Shuffleton, A Mixed Race (1993) p. 163]
See also
Further reading
-
Joseph Fliesler, Anecdota Americana (1927)
-
W. C. Hazlitt ed., Shakespeare Jestbooks 3vol (1864)
External links
