Medieval Times Were Filled With Laughter!

They were most of the time, anyway, or that’s the way I see it. There wasn’t much for the peasantry to laugh at except the village idiot, however. The village genius had long since worked his way up to become Jester of the King’s Court, where he brought down the whole castle with his zany brand of off-beat humor.

I mean, what do you suppose might have made someone like Henry VIII bust that fat gut of his? Jokes about how “All Your Majesty’s Exes Laughed Their Friggin’ Heads Off At The Final Verse of the Executioner’s Song”? Or, “Gee, Your Majesty, have you ever considered Royal Marriage Counseling? It’s getting hard to scare up a new Queen with Your Highness and his little drinking problem. Denial is not just a river in Egypt, Your Fatness. Does My Lord have an inner child with hurt feelings hiding in the Royal Closet? Or perhaps an eating disorder causing extreme weight gain with attendant feelings of shame and rage”?

You see, the therapy industry was in the cradle of its infancy in those days, and inner children had not been discovered yet. No, they were allowed free reign and threw horrible tantrums all over the place, I know for a fact. Marriage counseling was just a crude form of blaming and finger pointing, just like we did in kindergarten only worse. They did not know that it is never anyone’s fault, nor did they have the insights we have into the emotional-sexual complexities of human psychology and interaction. If a man became tired of his wife, he needn't bother with divorce court apparently – the greedy bitch would ask for half the bloody Kingdom, for chrissakes! So “off with her head”, was the only obvious way out of the whole messy entanglement I suppose.

I wonder if peasants could get away with that or if that was a royal privilege only? Six packs of beer didn’t exist, so wife beaters had to fashion crude devices made out of sticks or stones with which to pummel their poor wives. Husband beaters were far craftier in those days, where legend has it that the ancestors of John Wayne Bobbit first discovered the meaning of the word “rusty”. But marriage counseling would have helped stem the tide of abuse and keep it from reaching the epidemic proportions it did, at least in the Royal Court of His Majesty Henry VIII.

Nothing is funny about marital strife or beheadings, I am forced to admit. Nor is the concept of an inner child who is holding its breath until it turns blue, or throwing royal tantrums in court. Henry VIII probably had a drinking problem and an eating disorder from all the old paintings, especially the one we picture in our heads when we think of him. But he shouldn’t have taken it out on the poor women, is my whole thing.

Herman (of Herman’s Hermits) laid claim in the 60s to actually BEING Henry VIII, but if you visit any mental hospital you will find people claiming to be the Pope and Norman Einstein. I don’t buy it, myself. Even if he were the reincarnation of Henry VIII, problems like his take lifetimes to overcome according to the Eastern branch of Western psychiatric thinking these days. No, I have it from a reliable psychic source (moi) that Henry VIII came back as John Candy to break into Comedy (seeing as how the Throne was already occupied in the late 20th century). And you see where it got him – dead, that’s where.

Some people tell jokes about the Holocaust, which was not even a Medieval event to begin with. But even if it was Medieval it was NOT funny. People who laugh at those jokes will laugh at anything, and they worry me. I suspect it’s a sign of a humor gland that may be infected, or even worse – a sourpuss gland that is manufacturing a kind of “antagonist” that is similar to the way LSD works on the brain. That’s right, sourpuss molecules that trick the humor cells into receiving false signals that throw them all out of whack. Soon they are firing all over the place like Uzi machine guns instead of rifles aimed directly at their targets. That’s not funny, that’s sick!

So if I keep the black space of this column in the medieval days alone, we will not stray into horrific events of the mid 20th Century. We will laugh our proverbial asses off at the way those people dressed for one thing! It seems to me that they all decided to dress up like they were attending a Medieval Costume Fair at the same time! All the jousting and so forth that took place must have kept them laughing for hours. Jesters wandered the open countryside, telling hilarious one or two-liners for a pint of mead or a loaf of bread. A Jester was never out of work as long as there was open countryside to roam, mead to drink and bread to break with strangers! Ah, the days of yore, how filled with laughter and frivolity they must have been!

Then the Black Plague descended on the land, and all the laughter ceased. A vicious bacterial infectious disease that killed off the humor cells and paralyzed the humor glands struck every third man, woman and child. I can’t even imagine the stench of all the putrid and stale jokes that must have been told in those dark times. Even the wandering jesters were stricken, and many of them lay dying from snobbery phlegm that oozed from their mouths in the fields of the open countryside. How horrible it must have been.

Turns out it was just because people didn’t wash their hands after going poo poo, according to Kindergarten teacher. That’s why I always do that before I eat. Wouldn’t want to get the Black Plauge and die from humor starvation, would you? Like some medieval peasant lying in a heap of bodies rotting in the sunlight, with flies circling and maggots digging into your entrails? Not me! That would NOT be funny in the least.