SOURCE: “Humor in the Chansons de Geste,” Symposium Vol. XV, No. 3, Fall, 1961, pp. 185-97.

In the following essay, Susskind explores the various types of comedy employed in the chansons de geste, considers the butts of the jokes and ridicule, and speculates that one of humor’s functions was to inject some realism into the depiction of events and characters.

The mood of the chanson de geste was never unremittingly sombre. Curtius has remarked that from late antiquity the epic, considered on a level with pleasures of the table and the performance of mimes, contained a mixture of the comic and the serious: “When the medieval Latin, the earliest French, and the earliest Spanish epic conform in this, we may conclude that a comic element had always been part of the stock of medieval epic and was not introduced by corrupt minstrels.”¹

To be sure, instances of humor in...