Humour in Old English Literature: Communities of Laughter in Early Medieval England

Jonathan Wilcox has spent the past couple of decades examining humor and tone in Old English texts, efforts culminating in this long-anticipated monograph. Offering a broad survey of extant texts, expected and less so, including riddles, heroic literature, homilies, hagiographies, and romance, he relates traditional theories of the humorous to complicate the grim and earnest reputation generally understood about this under-challenged literary corpus. I have always seen this body of literature as funny in a myriad of ways: punning, witty, ironic, satiric, sardonic, obscene, campy, and playful. So I really want this book to be influential, to give permission for new generations of scholars to get weird in the topic. To let their freak flag fly.Up front, Wilcox offers that a book explaining the humor of an ancient literature is not likely to be funny itself. This prediction mostly proves true in this study—much to its detriment. The tone overall seems to be a matter of managing expectations: Wilcox concedes the literature “may not be bursting with eye-watering funniness” (p. 3), yet there is enough humor about to justify the study. More than one might think, but usually only to the level of a “smile” here and there. The issue feels like a lack of ambition and overabundant caution, as well as a refusal to take that literature as anything but sacrosanct. Sometimes one needs to draw a mustache on the things we love to really learn how they function. Not everyone can do that.These methodological issues crop up throughout the study, radiating from an introduction that's too self-constraining and perhaps a bit incurious. One example of this can be found in Wilcox's assessment of the field. He observes that he pursues a “distinctive approach which has attracted relatively little prior scholarship,” compared to his assessment of the current state of the field as involved mainly in “understanding issues of race and gender, or engaging with environmental and ecocritical concerns,” then lamenting that these approaches have therefore ignored questions of tone or humor (pp. 3–4). Such a statement could only be made if one failed to read many of the aforementioned studies, as questions of tone, affect, emotion—and even humor—are relevant to many of the critical areas he points to. This suggests wide scholarly lacunae will follow.The theoretical parameters Wilcox allows himself are their own narrow room, expressed in terms most would find reasonable but hardly grist for a “distinctive approach”: All serious theories of humour, then, observe an underlying doubleness as a necessary prerequisite. The processing of that doubleness by the one appreciating the humour involves delight has one set of expectations gets replaced by another. That process can be summarized as incongruity resolution. (p. 7)We can all appreciate the gentle oxymoron of “serious theories of humour,” yet in the momentary tension a discomfort can be detected, a doubt of legitimacy about the topic, of needing to maintain respectability in the eyes of others. There is a robust bibliography of research on how humor works, but I have to wonder what the unserious theories of humor would say. After all, one wouldn't ask the eagle what lies in the pit.This seems relevant because the defining principles of humor Wilcox brings to his survey —doubleness, incongruity, superiority, and release—do not feel particularly unique to humor. These forces indeed explain humor yet could also describe any sort of narrative, any manner of resolving a plot: they're essentially Aristotelian. After reading his summaries of these approaches, I still have to wonder what makes these texts of Old English distinctively humorous, not to mention how that humor may be seen as unique in the history of humor. Otherwise, one is left only identifying texts that everybody else has said are humorous and then trying to explain how those funny moments work. This sort of approach runs the risk of ignoring anything that doesn't already conform to our impression of what a humorous text looks like—or what early English culture was like. Humor lies indeed in the incongruities, yet a text that displays an incongruous humor would tell us a lot more about that genre. This is a distressing issue with the volume: it just tells us things we already know about these texts, giving lots of details but not enough analysis, nothing to surprise.Related to this, Wilcox's chosen theoretical directions do not offer him much imperative to distinguish between types of humor, types located less in kinds of texts intuited as humorous but more in the affective variety of humorous appeal. What is funny mobilizes its humorous effects in a broad range of ways. These effects may be whimsical, ridiculous, arch, droll, paronomastic, broad, campy, sarcastic, satirical, ironic, witty, referential, savage, or obscene. The teller or text may wish to draw forth a quiet smile or back-slapping guffaws, either to appreciate a nicety of wit or to encourage the marginalization of others, to critique some hypocrisy of the powerful or to reinforce abusive social hierarchies. In this study, however, a wink is as good as a nod.An example of this limit can be found in Wilcox's first chapter, which reasonably enough explores the Exeter Book Riddles. First on the plate is Riddle 51, usually solved as “pen and fingers.” Wilcox does an admirable job close-reading the poem, relating its language to identified riddlic structures, such as the “focus,” a term Patrick Murphy uses to describe a riddle's “obscuring metaphors,” what must be identified and read through in order to determine a solution to the puzzle (Unriddling the Exeter Riddles, 2011, pp. 18–21). Yet his final assessment of the riddle is lacking; the potential revelation of the muddy-footed birds as a pen writing on a page is indeed delightful, but not “funny” per se. What is whimsical and wry belongs to the humor effect, but they are not the same thing as a joke. The fact that the Old English feþer means “feather” and also “wing” or “pen” is hardly a pun; the latter two are both metonymies of the former. Also, the bird/writing connection is almost a commonplace in the Riddles, appearing in Riddles 26 and 57.Another example can be found in chapter five, “Playing with Parody for Comic Effect,” which observes the humorous aspects of several hagiographic texts, including the fascinatingly belligerent Andreas. The problem here is that Wilcox's analysis does not seem to have evolved much past his 2003 chapter, “Eating People is Wrong,” which strokes the poem's Eucharistic play and apparently incongruous parallels to Beowulf yet digs no deeper. Part of this surely stems from not engaging with many studies of the poem written since his chapter was published—work he shunts into a “cited but not relevant” footnote. A shame, because my chapter on Andreas is entirely about humor, satire, and savagery mobilized by the paradoxes of imagined cannibalism. A missed opportunity, even if one does not agree with my reading.As I mentioned earlier, Wilcox advises his reader that his study is unlikely to be found funny. Yet this prediction is hardly destiny—there are numerous ways to explore the whys and hows of humor and not be so serious. This book could have been winsome or whimsical, deft or droll, or lightheartedly lavished with puns. But it does not hit any of those marks, which is a shame. To conclude, the target audience for Humour in Old English Literature most likely is those unconvinced that Old English texts can be funny (or include funny effects), or students looking for a survey of relevant texts. Other contemporary scholars might find that Wilcox still needs to develop his routine.