Jest book  

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"The last conscientious jestbook editor , who was something other than a mere plagiarist , was Antoine Le Metel, sieur d'Ouville, whose Contes aux heures perdues, published first in 1644, became the storehouse rifled by all later compilers."--The Horn Book: Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography (1964) by Gershon Legman

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Jest books (or Jestbooks) are collections of jokes and humerous anecdotes in book form - a literary genre which reached its greatest importance in the early modern period. This article is largely based on Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1973) by G. Legman.

A typical joke is "The drowned woman and her husband".

Contents

Origins

The oldest surviving collection of jokes is the Byzantine Philogelos from the first millennium. In Western Europe, the medieval fabliau and the Arab/Italian novella 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.

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.From such universal collections, developed the particular vernacular jestbooks of the various European countries in the sixteenth century.

Elizabethan jestbooks

Characteristics

Tudor and Stuart jest books were typically anonymous collections of individual jests in English, a mix of verse and prose perhaps more comparable to the latter-day magazine than to a normal book. 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.

Jest books took a generally mocking tone, with civility, and social superiors like the 'stupid scholar' as favourite targets.

Influence

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.

Jestbooks also contributed to popular stage entertainment, through such dramatists as Marlowe and Shakespeare. Playbooks and jestbooks were indeed treated as much of a muchness as forms of light entertainment, with jokes from the one being recycled in the other, and vice versa.

Decline

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 jest book been a genuine folk content.

Bowdlerisation in the 19th century completed the fall of the English-language jest book from Elizabethan vitality to subsequent triviality.

Parallel traditions

  • French jestbooks were widely drawn on in the work of Rabelais. Arguably at least, the French jestbook tradition survived unbowdlerised into the twentieth century.
  • Germany had a rich tradition of jestbooks, with Till Eulenspiegel as a prominent character.
  • The first American jest book was published in 1787, and thereafter the genre flourished for some half a century, before giving was to the twin influence of censorship and the rise of the comic almanac.

Linking in as of 2023

A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors, Edward Allde, George Peele, Humanism in France, John Mottley, Joke, Peterborough House, Richard Tarlton, Rogue literature, Shakespeare's Jest Book, The Taming of the Shrew, The Jew Among Thorns, Ralph Wewitzer, Jan van Doesborch

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Jest book" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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