User:Jahsonic/AHE/The Middle Ages/The caveman (still) isn't dead
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In the 13th-and 14th-centuries, travelling troubadours roam France and tell fabliaux, short, usually bold and humorous stories. Fabliaux are close to the dirty joke on one side and to primitive wisdom literature on the other. Favourite subjects are cheated husbands, greedy clergymen and stupid peasants. The topics are tailored to the audience and tales about stupid peasants are told to the clergy and stories about greedy clergymen are told to the peasants. Humour is a main ingredient in all fabliaux. To this day, humour is used to render thorny and unspeakable subjects -- such as sex -- palatable, it is, as it were, the sauce that makes something non-digestible a gourmet meal for the mouths of a broad audience. But humour in these stories is also used as mockery, a way to make fun of people ("te kakken zetten"), even to make them look bad. These two components, the irreverent mockery and social lubricant, are the raison d'être of the fabliaux. They are also the literary primordial soup of the Middle Ages, dished, spiced and seasoned by Boccaccio and Chaucer, whose works, although often considered part of the Renaissance, are thoroughly medieval.
