Mirth Making: The Rhetorical Discourse on Jesting in Early Modern England.

• Author: Wiethoff, William E.
• Position: Book Reviews

Mirth Making: The Rhetorical Discourse on Jesting in Early Modern England. By Chris Halcomb. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001; pp. viii + 230. $29.95.

Chris Holcomb's Mirth Making addresses a significant need for research on witty rhetoric. More specifically, this book provides theory and examples relevant to enlivening and sharpening the discourses of advocacy. Despite the author's historical focus on the early modem period, he speaks articulately to twenty-first-century readers by addressing the elusiveness of humorous rhetoric and its use in a socially diverse forum where the range of acceptable behavior was becoming increasingly restricted. The book's organization, consisting of an introduction, four substantive chapters devoted to the settings, topics, targets, and audiences of jesting, but no conclusion, merits close assessment.

The Introduction provides a suitable preview that includes Holcomb's thoughtful assessment of his primary sources, from classical rhetorics and poetics, through medieval facetiae (collections of witty folklore), to Renaissance and early modem manuals on courtly behavior and jocund rhetoric (14-21). Although the author cites comprehensively the scholarship on humor in general and jesting in particular, the introduction and following chapters suggest a lesser command of movements in Renaissance humanism and early modem legal practice. Nonetheless, Holcomb lures the reader into the book's corpus by promising that "the handbooks often ignore in their invocations of decorum, but reveal nevertheless ... that jesting fuses the decorous and indecorous, the seemly and unseemly, in fittingly unfitting combinations" (24-25).

The initial treatment of "Jesting Situations" in early modem England surprisingly begins with the forensic wars waged in the ancient Roman forum. The point here is that Ciceronian advice on humorous rhetoric envisioned a battle between culturally homogeneous, socially equal, and similarly skilled advocates who dared not stray outside the bounds of decorum. Holcomb then contrasts this classical paradigm to Renaissance and early modem jesting in the pulpit and royal court where culturally and socially diverse speakers had to transcend differences in their status or skill as well as observe the bounds of decorum. This chapter enriches us with its illumination of theories and examples penned by Thomas Wilson and Erasmus for preachers, as well as Castiglione and Guazzo for courtiers.

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