THE HISTORY OF HUMOR

Old Comedy of the 6th & 5thCenturies BC often made fun of a specific person and of current political issues. Middle Comedy of the 5th& 4th Centuries BC made fun of more general themes such as literature, professions, and society. New Comedy of the 4th & 3rd Centuries BC usually revolved around the bawdy adventures of a blustering soldier, a young man in love with an unsuitable woman, or a father figure who cannot follow his own advice.

During the Middle Ages, Kings’ Court Jesters were not to be in competition with the Kings. So most often they were deformed midgets with humped backs and bug eyes. They acted stupidly and wore strange clothing—cap and bells, motley clothes, and pointed shoes.

Their scepters were made from pig bladders as parodies of the King’s scepter of power.

In many plays, the fool is smarter than the King, but because of his appearance he could be critical of the King and the Kingdom. There are both foolish and wise fools in Shakespeare’s plays. Contrast the dead fool (Yorrick) in Hamletwith the wise/foolish women in The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado about Nothing. Street jugglers and street musicians came out of these Renaissance traditions. So did England’s “Punch and Judy” shows, Italy’s “Commedia d’El Arte,” and France’s “Comedie Française,” as well as England’s “Comedy of Humours,” and “Comedy of Manners,” and America’s ventriloquists and political cartoonists.

The eighteenth century saw the rise of a new kind of humorous author: the wit. A wit is usually a person who can make quick, wry comments in the course of conversation.

During the 19th Century, on the American western frontier, wise fools, con-men, and tricksters like Johnson J. Hooper’s Simon Suggs and George Washington Harris’s Sut Lovingood were employed to portray the rough and unsophisticated American as an ironic hero. Suggs was lazy and dishonest, and he knew it was “good to be shifty in a new country.”

The golden age of humor was often considered to be the 1920s but would be more accurately placed from the end of WWI to the early 1930s. During this golden age, we see the development of the “little man” in Casper Milquetoast, Andy Gump, Jiggs, Mutt (of “Mutt and Jeff”), and Dagwood (of “Blondie and Dagwood”). The humorous comic strips that were revived after the Second World War (1940s) included Walt Kelly’s “Pogo,” and Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner.” Kelly’s swamp fables were allegorical ‘swamps’ themselves, loaded with social and political commentary lurking behind the antics and interactions of the familiar cast of animal characters. Al Capp’s “hillbillies” gave access to Capp’s views on topical events, government, and American values. So, how important is humor in determining the zeitgeist of the various periods of human history?