SOURCE: Tanner, Ron. “Humor in “Everyman and the Middle English Morality Play.” Philological Quarterly 70, no. 2 (spring 1991): 149-61.

In the following essay, Tanner refutes critics who claim that Everyman lacks humor, pointing to the dramatic irony of the work.

Nothing in the canon of English drama sounds more dreary or uninviting than the “morality play.” As W. R. Mackenzie observes, “While we may find ourselves approving highly of the conditions in life which are the results or natural accompaniments of morality, we feel something peculiarly unlovely in the connotations of the term itself.”¹ If the morality play is ignored or avoided by most students and general readers nowadays, as it seems to be, its neglect is due to this: short of sermons, no other form of literature is so unequivocally preachy. Yet this view of moralities as serious, dull, and didactic is a misconception sustained, especially among students, by...