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Overview
Mirth Making examines the complex and often contradictory ways in which writers of rhetoric and courtesy manuals during the English Renaissance counseled their readers on the powers and hazards of jesting. Chris Holcomb finds that rhetorical manuals of the early modern period reflect a reverence for Ciceronian humor and offer abundant guidance regarding the handling of wit and laughter. Shedding light on a subject largely neglected by contemporary scholars, Holcomb's pathbreaking study demonstrates how such humor-related advice points to and participates in broader cultural phenomena-most notably the era's increase in social and geographic mobility and the contest between authority and subversion.Describing the English Renaissance as a brief but crucial phase in the history of jesting discourse, Holcomb differentiates humor-related counsel of the period from that of classical and medieval sources by its focus on communication between people of different stations-preachers and lay congregations, masters and servants, nobles and tradesmen, courtiers and kings-rather than between equals. Holcomb shows that, in a changing society, handbook writers presented jesting as a socially conservative force, one that preserves distinctions and gradations in jeopardy of being blurred by upward or downward mobility. Such distinctions suggest that with a well-placed jest or quip, an orator might enhance his status and persuasive power or shame and ridicule those beneath him.
Holcomb also recognizes, however, that rhetoricians confronted significant challenges as they sought to capture, explain, and teach a strategy both powerful and chaotic, elusive and ubiquitous, highly economical inform and potentially unpredictable in effect. At the same time that the manuals offered recuperative strategies to regulate jesting and preserve social relations, they warned of the dangers associated with a discourse reliant on ambiguity, contradiction, and duplicity. Holcomb concludes that because of the disruptive energies inherent in jesting, rhetoricians of the English Renaissance could not escape the fact that jesting is always a flirtation with disaster.
Book Details
Published
July 31, 2001
Publisher
Columbia : University of South Carolina Press, c2001.
Pages
230
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9781570033971