This study addresses the underexplored evolution of comic elements in early English literature, challenging the misconception that Old English texts lacked intentional humor. Recognizing the scholarly gap in diachronic comic analysis, the research traces the progression from metaphorical wit in The Exeter Book riddles to explicit satire in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and medieval drama. The study employs close reading, comparative, diachronic, historical-contextual, and intertextual methodologies to examine humor’s rhetorical and social functions across genres and periods. Findings reveal that Old English literature featured subtle humor through irony and innuendo, while Middle English texts employed satire, fabliau, and performative comedy. The transitional Latin-English period maintained comic traditions in allegorical and didactic forms. The research contributes a new perspective to medieval literary studies by positioning humor as a meaningful literary mode, offering both scholarly insight and practical groundwork for further genre-based analysis of medieval texts.

Comic elements, Old English, Middle English

Curtius, E. R. (1953). European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Princeton University Press.

Dienhart, J. M. (1999). A linguistic look at riddles. Journal of Pragmatics, 31(1), 95–125. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0378-2166(98)00056-3

Ibáñez Villahoz, A. (2018). Humour in medieval English literature: Chaucer and the Mystery Plays. Universidad De Valladolid. http://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/33297

Kendrick, L. (2005). “In bourde and in pleye”: Mankind and the problem of comic derision in medieval English religious plays. Études Anglaises, 58(3), 261. https://doi.org/10.3917/etan.583.0261

Klinck, A. L. (1992). The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study. McGill-Queen's Press – MQUP.

Koestler, A. (1964). The act of creation. Hutchinson.

Mackie. W. S. (Ed.). (1934). The Exeter Book: Part II: Poems IX-XXXII. London: Oxfrod University Press.

Mann, J. (1973). Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The literature of social classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Cambridge University Press.

https://archive.org/details/isbn_052120058/page/n17/mode/2up

Mitchell, B., & C. Robinson, F. (1992). A guide to old English (5th ed.). Blackwell Publishers Ltd. (Original work published 1964)

O’Keeffe, K. O., & Orchard, A. (Eds.). (2005). Latin Learning and English Lore (Volumes I & II): Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature for Michael Lapidge. University of Toronto Press.

Wilcox, J. (2022). Objects That Object, Subjects That Subvert: Agency in Exeter Book Riddle 5. Humanities, 11(2), 33. https://doi.org/10.3390/h11020033

Wilcox, J. (2020). Humour and the Exeter Book riddles: Incongruity in Feþegeorn (R.31). In M. Cavell & J. Neville (Ed.), Riddles at work in the early medieval tradition: Words, ideas, interactions (pp. 128-145). Manchester: Manchester University Press.