Europe Through Jokes and Laughter

UCL History department are pleased to welcome Dr Christian Wenzel (University of Duisburg-Essen / Marburg University) to give this seminar. Christian Wenzel will talk about his new research project Europe through Jokes and Laughter.

"When you realise that you are not getting something – a joke, a proverb, a ceremony that is particularly meaningful to the natives – you can see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it.” This pointed observation by Robert Darnton - formulated in his now classic essay on the “Great Cat Massacre” - vividly highlights the epistemic potential of engaging with jokes and laughter from a historical perspective, as an entry point into historical frameworks of thought and discourses. While jokes, laughter, and humour have, for example, been extensively researched in the history of political theory, intellectual history, gender history, and the history of political polemic and satire, the ideas of cultural belonging and otherness that were conveyed, constructed, and manifested through jokes, laughter, and humour remain an area of early modern studies that is largely unexplored. To date, scholarship has been dominated by approaches that examine jokes, laughter, and humour primarily as subjects of the history of emotions and mentalities.

This is precisely where the present research project departs: it aims at an investigation of the construction and manifestation of ideas of cultural belonging and otherness in the context of early modern European expansion. A central analytical point of departure—one that thus targets the level of political communication—is the concept of “communities of laughter.” These communities form and define themselves through attributions of belonging and otherness, with belonging articulated through shared laughter and otherness through shared ridicule. Early modern joke books and humour collections, which exist in considerable number, make it possible to systematically reconstruct a European community of laughter that understood itself as European precisely through the collective derision of the non-European, thereby distinguishing “European” from “non-European.” The research project Europe through Jokes and Laughter thus seeks to examine a hitherto neglected facet of early modern constructions of European belonging and non-European otherness from a distinctly cultural-historical perspective, one attentive to the epoch’s specific logics and discourses.

The talk will be followed by a drinks reception. All welcome but please register to attend.

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This event has been organised by UCL History and is supported by the UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges. The Centre is dedicated to the study of the diverse cultural, economic and social exchanges between early modern states in the Old World and beyond in the period 1450-1800. Our work focuses on how complex intercultural interactions from translation to trade began to create borders and frontiers between countries, vernacular literatures and identities in this period.

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at University of Duisburg-Essen / Marburg University

His research interests include History of the French Wars of Religion and France in the 16th Century; Historical Security Research; Guarantees in the Early Modern Period; Contract Breaches and Contract Securing in the Early Modern Period; Reputation in the Early Modern Period; Cultural History of Early Modern International Law.

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Host or Publisher UCL Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS)