A recentdaily mirrorpoll set out to find the funniest Brit of all time. The winner was – Eric Morecambe. Not William Shakespeare. He only ranked somewhere among the also-rans.¹ Indeed, a common response to the topic of this book was the query, ‘Do you really think Shakespeare was funny?’ Clearly, nothing has a shorter shelf-life than humour.

This book will not set out the case for the defence, attempting to prove Shakespeare was funny. This is not a book about comedy. It is a book about laughter, not the comic. It will not be particularly amusing. There are...

A handful of courtiers gather at the court of their prince and amuse themselves devising games to fleet the time carelessly and beguile the ladies. Charming, gracious, and urbane, the courtiers engage in a series of witty skirmishes with the ladies, bandying jests and playing merry pranks. In the mockserious tone that characterizes their interaction, their conversation turns to the theme of jesting itself and to the norms that define the wit of the ideal courtier.

The court in question is not that of Navarre but the court of Urbino. The world of Castiglione’sBook of the Courtier(1528) displays...

Early modern thinkers were fascinated by the phenomenon of laughter. A wide range of scholars, from medical experts to moral reformers, commented on the theme of laughter in their writings. A key precept on which their discussions were based was the Aristotelian tenet that laughter was the property of the human race.¹ Medical theorists were exercised by the problem of where laughter originated and what organs were involved in the articulation of laughter. One of the best-known experts, the French royal physician Laurent Joubert, published in 1579 a treatise on laughter which was widely cited.² Joubert observed that laughter and...

Hamlet does not have a high opinion of the type of humour on offer on the early modern stage. He exhorts the players to ‘let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them. For there be of them that will themselves laugh to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. – That’s villainous and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.’¹

Behind the scenes there seems to have been an on-going tussle...

Religion had a problem with laughter. The Church trembled at the very thought. Mad medieval monks were willing to go to any lengths – including inventing breathtakingly ingenious deaths for their brethren – to prevent a book on laughter from falling into the wrong hands. Not just any book, of course, but the lost treatise on comedy by Aristotle. Laughter was dynamite – it would have blown away the entire edifice of the Church. The Puritans, true heirs of mad monk Jorge, gave a further twist to the screw and did everything in their power to proscribe laughter. Alas, the...

The myth of the inherently subversive power of laughter was put paid to by one of the leading cultural critics of our age – Umberto Eco himself. In a climactic scene inThe Name of the Roseset in the labyrinthine library, where the proto-Sherlock Holmes character William of Baskerville confronts the villain, Jorge of Burgos, with his crimes, the latter admits that he committed murder to prevent a book that justified carnivalesque laughter from becoming available to other readers. Hitherto carnival had merely been ‘the peasant’s entertainment, the drunkard’s license’² – but saturnalian inversion would gain enormous power when...