In December 1817 the radical publisher William Hone was tried three times, on three consecutive days, because he had parodied the church's prayers to make political points about the corruption of Parliament and the state. One of the publications for which he was prosecuted, The Sinecurist's Creed, parodied the Athanasian Creed in order to attack those who had been given a well-paid job in return for political loyalty to the government:

Another of the offending pamphlets, The Late John Wilkes's Catechism, parodied a religious catechism to offer instructions ‘to be learned of every Person before he be brought to be confirmed a Placeman or Pensioner by the Minister’. Its central character, Lickspittle, is taught to become ‘the Child of Corruption, and a Locust to devour the good Things of this Kingdom’ by doing the ministry's every bidding. It offered ‘ten commandments’, which included the injunctions ‘Thou shalt not take the Pension of thy Lord the Minister in vain’ and ‘Thou shalt not say, that to rob the Public is to steal’. The catechism also included a parody of the Lord's Prayer:

A third offending publication, The Political Litany, similarly used a parody of conventional religious responses in order to attack corruption.

At the heart of this volume is the opposition between two terms, corroding and binding, between the capacity of satire and laughter simultaneously to subvert authority and confront iniquity while also solidifying communities of readers. Nowhere was this opposition more carefully, anxiously or contentiously studied than the golden age of English satire, between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the deaths of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope in the middle of the eighteenth century. These debates targeted the nature of satire: what it was and what it was supposed to do. During this same period, a second philosophical dispute also opened up on the margins of literary, sociological and psychological theory about the nature and function of laughter. Both sides of these debates were eagerly and antagonistically argued: satirists were high-minded public moralists or they were vindictive lampooners; laughter was a form of splenetic superiority or merely a pleasing response to an innocuous incongruity.

This chapter is an attempt to trace those debates. But it is also an attempt to account for the ticklish relationship between satire and laughter more broadly from the perspective of recent psychological theories. In both eliciting laughter and solidifying communities, I claim, satirists were also offering a deeply affective experience for readers. According to most theorists then and today, satire was supposed to correct vice – either the vices of the satiric victim or those of the reader. But such a theory of satiric correction presupposes that readers and targets, having read a work of satire, will proactively apply the lessons of the work to themselves. Richard Morton has offered the pithiest articulation of this thesis: ‘The aim of satire was reformation through perceptive ridicule. The satirist saw what was wrong with the world; the reader reciprocated by agreement and amendment.’ Critics of satire, however, have had severe doubts, both then and today, that there is any simple or straightforward transaction between reading satire and reforming vice. Readers might have laughed at satiric works and their victims, but many questioned whether those chortles so readily translated into an easily imbibed lesson or practical self-correction.

For early modern people, laughter was capable of altering the world around it: it was a vigorous means of doing. It could bind or corrode. In charivari and other punitive rituals that shamed moral transgressors – cuckolds, shrewish women, adulterers – laughter policed social mores and restored cultural norms by theatrically chastising those who broke them; conversely, in taunting rhymes and mock trials it eroded ties of respect that legitimised authority. Laughter variously mocked and punished, united groups and reaffirmed boundaries, in a range of contexts. Its potency to do was ever-present. Such potency renders laughter's ethical status troubling, either because it was intended to offend, or because it has become offensive over time: consider the persistent mockery of rape victims and the disabled in jest-books; or the lack of sympathy we often feel with satirists who lash their subjects. Early modern laughter can make us deeply uncomfortable. Early modern satire also has many undesirable characteristics: a dense barrage of scorn that co-joined author and audience in an act of violence against its object, it is consequently capable of making modern readers squeamish. That squeamishness is a reaction to laughter's expression of superiority, a deliberate exaggeration of a perceived difference that objectifies or ‘others’ someone/ thing to create and sustain ‘structures of exaltation or abjection’, which empower one social group at the expense of another. The superiority theory has triggered equivalent condemnations in sociology, psychology, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. For Theodor Adorno, for example, laughter is unethical because it is illogical – he ‘who has laughter on his side’, Adorno warned, ‘has no need of proof’. Many critics doubt that laughter can ever be an ethical act.

The argument below is twofold. First, that the problematic aspects of satirical laughter – its corrosive energies of negation – were often central to its polemical appeal and effect. The agency to damage made laughter a precarious weapon, opening those who used it to charges of sedition. Both labels – satire and sedition – accorded laughter political impetus. Disagreements centred upon the morality of laughing in a specific context, not on the force of the laughter (which both labels characterised as considerable).

On 4 March 1607, Sir Henry Ludlow, sitting in the English House of Commons representing the constituency of Wiltshire, farted. Since there is no formal record of parliamentary proceedings in early Stuart England, we are dependent for our knowledge of this interjection upon a poem. This poem, ‘The Censure of the Parliament Fart’, or, more simply, ‘The Parliament Fart’, consists of rhyming tetrameter couplets, most of which centre upon the imagined reactions of particular members of the House to Ludlow's fart. While extant manuscript versions vary considerably in length, and it seems that some collectors were adding couplets many years after the event, some of the more reliable copies run to just over two hundred lines. Despite this length, which is unusual in the culture of manuscript circulation of the seventeenth century, it was very widely circulated, both at its time of composition and in subsequent decades. Michelle O'Callaghan, who has edited the most authoritative version, has identified forty extant manuscripts, as well as two Restoration printed versions. ‘The Parliament Fart’ demands recognition, on the basis of these remarkable statistics, as one of the best-known and best-loved poems of the seventeenth century.

‘The Parliament Fart’ is an urbane exercise in wit, yet it is also keenly aware of its invocation of popular traditions. While most existing commentary on this poem has focused on its subtle characterisations and political reflections, I lean more heavily here on the function of the popular. Given that the poem generates much of its comic energy from a demotic breach of decorum, I consider how a study of popular humour might help us to appreciate not only this poem but also the political culture within which it was situated. While popular and elite strains of humour are notoriously difficult to distinguish at any time, there was perhaps no period of early modern history when their relation was more fraught than in the decades from the 1590s to the 1620s. These years encompassed an extraordinary outpouring of prose and verse satire, and subsequently the great era of early Stuart libelling. In a political arena, they were years in which the authority of the House of Commons, with its claims to represent the people, was subject to intense scrutiny. Several early Stuart parliaments collapsed acrimoniously; after 1629, Charles I resolved to rule without recourse to this troublesome body.

A royalist martyrology is not necessarily the first place you might turn to in search of a laugh. The book known as the Sufferings of the Clergy, published by Devonshire clergyman John Walker in 1714, is consequently better known to historians than to specialists in eighteenth-century satire. What is less known is that the voluminous correspondence on which it was based, along with recording memories of loyalist sufferings during the Civil Wars, also contains a rich seam of ridicule directed against the interregnum church and its clergy. During Queen Anne's reign, what Andrew Marvell had styled ‘jocular divinity’ was at its height. Even Jonathan Swift, in his A Tale of a Tub, published in 1704 – the same year Walker began researching – complained of the ‘so very numerous’ ‘wits of the present age’, before calculating the number at a figure remarkably close to the number of beneficed Church of England clergy. Visual and verbal satire had become the dominant mode of addressing religious anxieties over the perceived threat to the established church from dissent. While the satirical efforts of Swift (and of Daniel Defoe on the other side) have been much studied, non-canonical efforts from contemporary discourse have attracted less attention.

None of the manuscript satire in John Walker's archive was judged fit for publication at the time. Loyalists were extremely sensitive to the widespread characterisation of their own Civil War clergy as ‘scandalous ministers’, a notoriety lasting well into the eighteenth century. This left them reluctant to adopt their adversaries’ ad hominem approach, in print at least. The dean of Norwich, Humphrey Prideaux, discouraged Walker from examining nonconformists’ characters; although ‘much practised’ by ‘the other side’, it was ‘the Devill's office’, ill-befitting a ‘good Christian or a Divine’. Edward Chamberlain, rector of Letton in Herefordshire, advised Walker to say nothing on the ‘intruders’ who had displaced loyalists, out of respect for their more conformist descendants. Thomas Rennell, fellow of Exeter College, appealed to Walker for ‘moderation’, although this would ‘make your book less entertaining’.

John Gay wrote the above lines in a letter to Alexander Pope, and it appears on his monument as an epitaph. Whereas his friend Jonathan Swift claimed saeva indignatio in death, the cheerful Gay's last message seems to express contemptus mundi. It coincides in spirit with a letter he wrote to Swift just after the first publication of his Fables. ‘I expect nothing, & am like to get nothing’, Gay writes, then, further down the page, ‘[t]he contempt of the world grows upon me, and I now begin to be richer and richer, for I find I could every morning I wake be content with less than I aim'd at the day before’. My aim in this chapter is to explore whether there is anything more than a conventional ironic gesture in Gay's epitaph, or defensive false modesty in a letter to a more famous friend. In particular, I will explore whether contempt is a dominant passion in his notorious ballad operas of the late 1720s, The Beggar's Opera and Polly. The two plays were separated at birth for very different stage histories, the former being an unprecedented hit that ran for an entire winter season and the latter being banned on stage to circulate only in print until performed in 1777. Since then Beggar's Opera has been a staple of the English stage and Polly largely neglected. In 1728–29, however, the two plays were an almost continuous political event central to a broad programme of satirical dissent against the regime of Sir Robert Walpole. Rather than treating them as qualitatively different – a great work focused on London low life and a minor work set among pirates and plantations in the West Indies – this chapter will read them as they might have been understood, at least by supporters of the Viscount Bolingbroke's Patriot Opposition, as a single political and dramatic arc. That is, to put it bluntly, a spectacular arc of mocking contempt for the first and longest-serving prime minister.

Laughing Gas

From 1797 to 1798 and again between 1803 and 1805, there was an outpouring of prints depicting Napoleon Bonaparte and the threatened – on many accounts, impending – invasion of Britain. The unequivocal message of the prints was that Bonaparte and the French army posed a credible threat to Britain, in particular around the south coast where the crossing of the English Channel, or La Manche, seemed an eminently practical possibility. Some prints were clearly fanciful and humorous, but even these had more serious components. For example, Isaac Cruickshank's scatological Bonne Farte Raising a Southerly Wind (Plate I: 1798) depicts Bonaparte bent over, his breeches pulled down, being fed a purgative to enable him to fart a stream of invasion balloons, men on horseback, guillotines and sundry military forces and apparatus across the channel. On the right, a huge fish delivers up members of the French Assembly to Dover, including Gaspard Monge, the mathematician credited with designing a giant raft for the invasion, to be welcomed by Charles James Fox who comments on the fragrant breeze. At the centre of the scene, in the middle distance, is Monge's huge invasion raft surrounded by accompanying smaller vessels. This representation is dramatically more realistic than most of the other elements in the picture.

Did people at the time think that this print was funny? How did they react and how were they meant to react to the invasion raft? It is one of the more popular prints today but it raises some difficult questions about who would laugh at it and why, and what the relationship might be between the humorous elements and the more realistic representations of danger in the print. And those questions need to be answered if we are to understand the creation and publishing of caricatures and popular prints, how designers and engravers might have conceived of what they were doing and the place that prints had in the political culture of the period.

One possible source for the printmakers’ construction of their craft, albeit much critiqued in the eighteenth century, was Hobbes's suggestion that ‘Laughter is nothing else but sudden Glory, arising from some sudden Conception of some Eminency in our selves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.’

Introduction: The Ambivalence of Laughter

Early modern dictionaries not only capture the ambivalence of laughter: through the preponderance of negative synonyms that they list – scorn, mock, jeer, fleer, scoff – they also encapsulate its strong association with derision, a word etymologically linked to the Latin ‘ridere’. This derisive strain is evident, for instance, in the way that – in the example above – Randle Cotgrave chose to group ‘ieast’ with verbs utilising the preposition ‘at’, rather than ‘with’. Even his onomatopoeiac ‘tighie’ (‘tee-hee’) is far from neutral, defined by the OED as indicating ‘the sound of a light laugh, usually derisive’. It is this disdainful perception of laughter that dominates early modern discussions of the phenomenon. As Quentin Skinner notes, ‘with the recovery of the classical theory of eloquence – one of the defining achievements of Renaissance culture – the classical theory of laughter was likewise revived’. This was a theory that associated laughter, above all, with contempt: Plato's Republic ‘foreshadows the central principle of Aristotle's analysis when he declares that laughter is almost always connected with the reproving of vice’; Cicero's De Oratore restricts laughter ‘to matters that are in some way either disgraceful or deformed’; Quintilian's De Institutione finds that laughter ‘has its source in things that are either deformed or disgraceful in some way’. Thomas Wilson consequently drew on a long-established tradition when he declared in 1553 that: ‘The occasion of laughter, and the meane that maketh vs merie […] is the fondnes, the filthines, the deformitee, and all suche euill behauior, as we se to bee in other.’

Regarded as a ‘merie’ response to regrettable things, there is thus a duality to early modern conceptions of laughter. This can be seen in Laurent Joubert's Traité du Ris, initially written in Latin in the 1550s and first printed, translated into French, in its complete form in 1579.

This volume argues that laughter and satire played significant roles in political processes and social practices in a range of historical contexts in early modern Britain. Their role was contradictory and ambiguous: laughter and satire both defined or solidified communal boundaries by confronting those who breached social mores and offered potent ways to challenge and corrode those boundaries. Satire did not necessarily provoke laughter, and not all laughter was satirical, but the two were often closely intertwined even though they had slightly separate histories and purposes: both raised questions about when they were appropriate and, as a result, both occupied a highly ambiguous and contested space. Both could foster common identities whilst at the same time being capable of dividing, attacking and subverting those identities, cultural assumptions or political and religious positions. Indeed, this vibrant duality, constructive and destructive, and the fundamental ambiguity about when laughter was appropriate, are reflected in the linguistic inventiveness of the early modern period, when new words to describe types of laughter were forged or when old words acquired new meanings.

To understand what past cultures laughed at, and why they found certain types of laughter objectionable in certain contexts, is to open a window onto the social mores and assumptions of those cultures: to understand in what ways they are both familiar and unfamiliar to us. Because laughter is an instant reaction, it speaks to the heart of those mores. In the words of Robert Darnton: ‘When you realise that you are not getting something – a joke, a proverb, a ceremony – that is particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it.’ Getting the joke helps us to ‘get’ at fundamental assumptions in a given society or culture.

Monks, nuns and friars provided plentiful inspiration for satire and laughter in early sixteenth-century England. Jestbooks, ballads and satires penned in private letters or in published tracts all abounded with humour about those in religious orders. There was no theme more ripe for mockery, irony or satire than the perceived discrepancy between the ideal of strict observance to the rule of poverty, chastity and obedience, and the more sobering reality of monastic existence, a reality frequently expressed through the rhetoric of the seven deadly sins. The difference between ideal and reality was complicated by the monastic double bind ‘between the reforming imperative of withdrawal, and the social imperative of integration’. It was the inability to reconcile such disjunctures that provided the inspiration for much early modern satire, and it was on the theme of monasticism and the religious life in the 1530s that humour became politically charged. This humour, which had been used by those who sought entertainment or those who urged reform, took on new resonances in the 1530s. It was lent a new urgency by the political and religious upheavals of a decade that witnessed one of the greatest transformations in the lives and history of religious men and women in England. In 1534 the Act of Dispensation severed the link between the English monasteries and the pope. Under the authority of Henry VIII as head of the national Church of England, monastic houses were subject to visitations between 1535 and 1539, reports of which were sent to Thomas Cromwell. By 1540, monasticism had been virtually extinguished in England, forcing over ten thousand monks, nuns and friars from the confines of their rule or cloister back into the world. Traditions of anti-monastic satire were exploited by the Henrician government in order to construct a politicised discourse to justify the dissolution of the monasteries.

Anti-monastic satire was certainly not a cause of the dissolution of the monasteries, nor should its existence be read as reflective of widespread opinion that sought the destruction of the religious life. A. G. Dickens's emphasis on using this broad anticlerical discourse as a phenomenon to help explain the welcome acceptance of the Henrician Reformation has long been discredited.