Jest books (or Jestbooks) are collections of

jokes A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, ...

and humorous anecdotes in book form – a literary genre which reached its greatest importance in the early modern period.

Origins

The oldest surviving collection of jokes is the Byzantine '' Philogelos'' from the first millennium. In Western Europe, the medieval

fabliau A ''fabliau'' (; plural ''fabliaux'') is a comic, often anonymous tale written by jongleurs in northeast France between c. 1150 and 1400. They are generally characterized by sexual and scatological obscenity, and by a set of contrary attitudes� ...

and the Arab/Italian novella built up a large body of humorous tales; but it was only with the ''

Facetiae The ''Facetiae'' is an anthology of jokes by Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), first published in 1470. It was the first printed joke book. The collection, "the most famous jokebook of the Renaissance", is notable for its inclusion of scatological ...

'' 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 Heinrich Bebel (1472 in Ingstetten (now part of Schelklingen) – 1518 Tübingen) was a German humanist. Biography He was an alumnus of Krakow and Basel universities, and from 1497 professor of poetry and rhetoric at the University of Tübingen. ...

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

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 The picaresque novel ( Spanish: ''picaresca'', from ''pícaro'', for "rogue" or "rascal") is a genre of prose fiction. It depicts the adventures of a roguish, but "appealing hero", usually of low social class, who lives by his wits in a corru ...

sort of narrative around one, often roguish hero, as with

Richard Tarlton Richard Tarlton (died September 1588), was an English actor of the Elizabethan era. He was the most famous clown of his era, known for his extempore comic doggerel verse, which came to be known as "Tarltons". He helped to turn Elizabethan theatre ...

. Jest books took a generally mocking tone, with civility, and social superiors like the 'stupid scholar' as favourite targets. The low-life, realistic tone of the jest book, akin to

coney-catching ''Coney-catching'' is Elizabethan slang for theft through trickery. It comes from the word "coney" (sometimes spelled ''conny''), meaning a rabbit raised for the table and thus tame. A coney-catcher was a thief or con man. It was a practice in me ...

pamphlets, fed into the early English novels (or at least prose fiction) of writers like

Thomas Nashe Thomas Nashe (baptised November 1567 – c. 1601; also Nash) was an Elizabethan playwright, poet, satirist and a significant pamphleteer. He is known for his novel ''The Unfortunate Traveller'', his pamphlets including ''Pierce Penniless,'' ...

and

Thomas Deloney Thomas Deloney (born ; died in or shortly before 1600) was an English silk-weaver, novelist, and ballad writer. Biography Thomas Deloney was born sometime in the middle decades of the 16th century; the precise date is not recorded. Although ofte ...

. Jestbooks also contributed to popular stage entertainment, through such dramatists as

Marlowe Marlowe may refer to: Name * Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), English dramatist, poet and translator * Philip Marlowe, fictional hardboiled detective created by author Raymond Chandler * Marlowe (name), including list of people and characters w ...

and

Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's natio ...

. Playbooks and jestbooks were treated as forms of light entertainment, with jokes from the one being recycled in the other, and vice versa. 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 Till Eulenspiegel (; nds, Dyl Ulenspegel ) is the protagonist of a German chapbook published in 1515 (a first edition of ca. 1510/12 is preserved fragmentarily) with a possible background in earlier Middle Low German folklore. Eulenspiegel is a ...

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 way to the twin influence of censorship and the rise of the comic almanac.

References

{{Reflist, 2}

External links

Jestbooks (London)
Fiction forms Humour Jokes

Origins

Elizabethan jestbooks

Parallel traditions

See also

References

Further reading

External links