Daniel Derrin & Hannah Burrows 
The Palgrave Handbook of Humour, History, and Methodology 

This handbook addresses the methodological problems and theoretical challenges that arise in attempting to understand and represent humour in specific historical contexts across cultural history. It explores problems involved in applying modern theories of humour to historically-distant contexts of humour and points to the importance of recognising the divergent assumptions made by different academic disciplines when approaching the topic. It explores problems of terminology, identification, classification, subjectivity of viewpoint, and the coherence of the object of study. It addresses specific theories, together with the needs of specific historical case-studies, as well as some of the challenges of presenting historical humour to contemporary audiences through translation and curation. In this way, the handbook aims to encourage a fresh exploration of methodological problems involved in studying the various significances both of the history of humour and of humour in history. 

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Part I: Preliminaries: terms and theories










1. Introduction – Daniel Derrin


2. The Study of Past Humour: Historicity and the limits of Method- Conal Condren


3. No Sense of Humour? ‘Humour’ Words in Old Norse- Hannah Burrows 
4. Rewriting Laughter in Early Modern Europe- Lucy Rayfield

5. The Humour of Humours: Comedy Theory and Eighteenth-Century Histories of Emotions- Rebecca Tierney-Hynes 


6. Bergson’s Theory of the Comic and its Applicability to Sixteenth-Century Japanese Comedy- Jessica Milner Davis 


7. Comic Character and Counter-violation: Critiquing Benign Violation Theory- Daniel Derrin 
8. Humour and Religion: New Directions?- Richard A. Gardner 





Part II: Case studies






9. Visual Humour on Greek Vases (550-350 BC): Three Approaches to the Ambivalence of Ugliness in Popular Culture- Alexandre Mitchell 


10. Approaching Jokes and Jestbooks in Premodern China- Giulia Baccini 


11. Testing the Limits of Pirandello’s Umorismo: a Case Study Based on Xiaolin Guangji- Antonio Leggieri 


12. The Monsters that Laugh Back: Humour as a Rhetorical Apophasis in Medieval Monstrology- Rafał Borysławski 


13. Medieval Jokes in Serious Contexts: Speaking Humour to Power- Martha Bayless 


14. ‘Lightness and Maistrye’: Herod, Humour and Temptation in Early English Drama- Jamie Beckett


15. Embodied Laughter: Rabelais and the Medical Humanities- Alison Williams


16. Naïve Parody in Rabelais- John Parkin


17. ‘By God’s Arse’: Genre, Humour and Religion in William Wager’s Moral Interludes- Lieke Stelling


18. Romantic Irony: Problems of Interpretation in Schlegel and Carlyle- Giles Whiteley 


19. Unlocking Verbal-Visual Puns in Late-Nineteenth-Century Japanese Cartoons- Ronald Stewart 


20. Popular Humour in Nordic Jesting Songs of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Danish Recordings of Oral Song Tradition- Lene Halskov Hansen 


21. Spanish Flu: The First Modern Case of Viral Humour?- Nikita Lobanov 










Part III: Humour of the Past in the Present






22. Translating Humour in The Song of Roland- John Du Val 


23. Intercultural and Interartistic Transfers of Shandean Humour in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries- Yen-Mai Tran-Gervat 


24. The Scholars, Chronique indiscrète or Neoficial’naja istorija? The challenge of Translating Eighteenth-century Chinese Irony and Grotesque for Contemporary Western Audiences- Anna Di Toro 


25. Putting Humour on Display- Laurence Grove


26. Building The Old Joke Archive- Bob Nicholson and Mark Hall

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Daniel Derrin is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, UK.
He has held research and teaching fellowships in Australia and the UK and has published widely on early modern literature and on humour.





Hannah Burrows is Senior Lecturer in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Aberdeen, UK. She has edited and translated the Old Norse riddle corpus for the Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages series, and her publications include articles on the relationship between the riddles and Norse mythological poetry.