Disability Humour in English Jestbooks of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

If we define culture as a set of tools for making sense of the world, and all the ways in which those tools are used, then 'culture, the great enabler, is also disabling'. 1 Let me quote this well-known suggestion by Ray McDermott and Herve Varenne at more length.If culture teaches us all we know and the ways it can be known, it always also gives us 'a blind side, a deaf ear, a learning problem, and a physical handicap.For every skill that people gain, there is another that is not developed; for every focus of attention, something is passed by; for every specialty, a corresponding lack.' 2 Culture invents 'disabilities' for us.The meanings of bodily normalcy and deviancy are defined against each other, and the practices that classify and control bodily lacks are constructed within culture.In this article, the cultural work that constructs disability takes the form of humour.I look at how disability was represented in sixteenthand seventeenth-century English jestbooks and reflect on what these jokes suggest about early modern society and its disabilities more generally. 3It would be easy to see comic portrayals of disability only as a history of victimization, but although there is no denying that discrimination against disabled people was widespread, I want to argue for a more complex view into the workings of comic disability.However conservatively framed, humour always suggests an ambiguity, a possibility of interpretation on various levels that remains unstable regardless of the joker's intentions.Disabled people were consistently presented as objects of ridicule in early modern humour, but underneath the jokes' surface, more can be detected than just cruelty and callousness.It would be too much to suggest that