This love of the comic seems to have been fostered by the leisure and the lively turn of some ecclesiastics.  In the injunctions given to the British Church in the year 680, no bishop is to allow tricks or jocosities (ludos vel jocos) to be exhibited before him, and later we read of two monks, near Oxford, receiving a man hospitably, thinking he was a “jougleur,” and could perform tricks, but kicking him out on finding themselves mistaken.  We find some of the monks amusing themselves with “cloister humour,” consisting principally of logical paradoxes; while others indulged in verbal curiosities, such as those of Tryphiodorus, the lipogrammatist, who wrote an Odyssey in twenty-four books without once using the letter A. Some were more fond of pictorial designs, and carved great figures on the chalk downs, such as the Giant of Cerne Abbas, in Dorsetshire, and the Long Man of Wilmington, in Sussex.

As we found reason to believe that the earliest kind of laughter was that of pleasure, so in this revival of civilization, we often see humour regarded as having no influence beyond that of ministering to amusement.  The mind was scarcely equal to regarding things in more than one light.  A jest was often viewed as entirely unimportant, its levity and depreciatory character being altogether overlooked.  To this and to the hostile element then very prominent, we may attribute the caricatures of the devil, formerly so common.  Before the tenth century, the devil was thought too dreadful to be portrayed, but afterwards, as the Church made a liberal exhibition of the torments of hell, the idea occurred of deterring offenders by representing evil spirits in as frightful a form as possible.  Some think that such figures were suggested by the Roman satyrs, but they may have come from Jewish or Runic sources.  There is a mediaeval story of a monk having carved an image of the devil so much more repulsive than he really was, that the sable gentleman called upon him one night to expostulate.  The monk, however, was inexorable.  But the story says further that, although the holy man was proof against the entreaties of the devil, he was not so well armed against the fascinations of the fair, and owing to his suffering a defeat at the hands of the latter came afterwards to be shut up in prison.  The original of his portrait again called upon him, and the monk agreed that, if he would obtain his release, he would represent him as a handsome fellow.

As times advanced, people began to fear the devil less, and to be amused at these strange carvings.  From regarding them as ludicrous, it was only a step to make humorous caricatures—­and there could be little harm in ridiculing the Devil.  Thus we frequently find imps and demons brought in to perform the comic parts in the Church mysteries.  It was a short advance from the ludicrous to the humorous, and thus we find the devil a merry fellow, playing all kinds of practical jokes on mankind.  Such representations would now appear rather ludicrous than humorous, and are seldom seen, except to amuse children on Valentine’s Day.