The New Jester

I'm no expert or historian, but it seems to me that people in pre-modern times had a strange kind of humor. Reading Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, you find them abound with scatological jokes, which back then seemed to have been deemed the height of humor. The stories usually go like this: Till Eulenspiegel takes what someone says literally. Then that other person gets his revenge by taking somewhat Eulenspiegel says literally. Then Eulenspiegel plays him a prank that involves no clever wordplay, but feces. Har har.

Also, a lot of humor seemed to have revolved around theology and the church: the Carmina Burana, for example, contains a long, tedious parody of a mass, complete with music (not the music written by Carl Orff, I mean the original music discovered by painstakingly comparing different sources).

But one constant throughout the times seems to have been a fondness for obscene humor. Shakespeare's plays, for example, are utterly not family friendly, since even his most tragic tragedies are filled to the brim with obscenities. All the more funny that some right wing "identitarian" idiots in Anglo-Saxon countries try to peddle him as an example of the good old times when entertainment wasn't sullied by liberal Marxist filth. They surely never watched any of his plays, but of course their whole European identity is a sham, since they don't really care about it or have any clue what it entails. Cross-dressing, vulgarities, romantic affection between men, cruelty, lame puns, mixing the high and the low, gender confusion, the bitter fate of strangers in a strange land, all that is Shakespeare. I'm not saying that my caption would thematically fit right into a Shakespearean play, because it wouldn't, it would be completely anachronistic, but that's not because its themes were absent back then, they were just combined and arranged in a different fashion.