Jest books (orjestbooks) are collections of jokes and humorous anecdotes in book form – a literary genre which reached its greatest importance in the early modern period.[1]
The oldest surviving collection of jokes is the Byzantine Philogelos from the first millennium.[2] In Western Europe, the medieval fabliau[3] and the Arab/Italian novella[4] built up a large body of humorous tales; but it was only with the FacetiaeofPoggio (1451) that the anecdote first appears rendered down into joke form (with prominent punchline) in an early modern collection.[5]
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.[6] From such universal collections, developed the particular vernacular jestbooks of the various European countries in the sixteenth century.[7]
Tudor and Stuart jest books were typically anonymous collections of individual jests in English,[8] a mix of verse and prose perhaps more comparable to the latter-day magazine than to a normal book.[9] 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.[10] Jest books took a generally mocking tone,[11] with civility, and social superiors like the 'stupid scholar' as favourite targets.[12]
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.[13] Jestbooks also contributed to popular stage entertainment, through such dramatists as Marlowe and Shakespeare.[14] Playbooks and jestbooks were treated as forms of light entertainment, with jokes from the one being recycled in the other, and vice versa.[15]
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 jest book been a genuine folk content.[16] Bowdlerisation in the 19th century completed the fall of the English-language jest book from Elizabethan vitality to subsequent triviality.[17]