Jest books (or Jestbooks) are collections of
jokes 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
''Philogelos'' ( grc, Φιλόγελως, "Love of Laughter") is the oldest existing collection of jokes. The collection is written in Ancient Greek, and the language used indicates that it may have been written in the fourth century AD, according ...
'' 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 attitude ...
and the Arab/Italian
novella
A novella is a narrative prose fiction whose length is shorter than most novels, but longer than most short stories. The English word ''novella'' derives from the Italian ''novella'' meaning a short story related to true (or apparently so) facts ...
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
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.
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 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
The Elizabethan era is the epoch in the Tudor period of the history of England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603). Historians often depict it as the golden age in English history. The symbol of Britannia (a female personifi ...
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 way to the twin influence of censorship and the rise of the comic almanac.
See also
*
Robert Armin
*
Salcia Landmann
*
Shakespeare's Jest Book
References
{{Reflist, 2}
Further reading
* Joseph Fliesler, ''Anecdota Americana'' (1927)
* W. C. Hazlitt ed., ''Shakespeare Jestbooks'' 3vol (1864)
External links
Jestbooks (London)
Fiction forms
Humour
Jokes