Scholars may have an authentic manuscript of a medieval comedy show — and it's pretty funny

Troubadours, jesters, minstrels, bards: Whatever you choose to call them, these wandering entertainers captivated medieval Europeans for centuries. Medieval bards possessed imaginations so fertile, and wits so sharp, that Westerners still remember them long after their jokes and tall tales have faded from memory. Indeed, as Cambridge University and Girton College historian Dr. James Wade writes in his recent paper, published in The Review of English Studies, most of the words actually used by these troubadours have been forever lost; for instance, no one has found "a single medieval English manuscript with plausible connections to an actual medieval minstrel."

Yet if Wade's new paper is correct, there is a collection of newly discovered texts at the National Library of Scotland that may shed some light into this dark corner of the past. In addition to containing the earliest known example of the expression "red herring," this late 15th-century booklet, known as the Heege Manuscript, appears to record the repertoire of an entertainer from that period. If so, denizens of the 21st century can rest assured of at least one thing — six centuries ago, comedians had very similar senses of humor.

"A surprising conclusion is that medieval minstrels were offering comic performances, rather than the kinds of material we usually associate with medieval minstrelsy, such as Robin Hood ballads, tales of chivalry, and accounts of great battles," Wade told Salon by email. He later added that these comedians had, "the instinct to self-ironize, to use crude bodily humor, to use slapstick and situational comedy, and the willingness to make the audience the butt of the joke."

Wade compared the comedy from the Heege Manuscript to the work of modern British comedians like Monty Python, and in particular troupe member Terry Jones, who "was a great scholar of the Middle Ages, and he knew medieval humor very well. My other thought was Bill Bailey, who has a decent sketch in Middle English, about drunkenness and revelry."

When asked if there are any important differences in the comedy styles of medieval England compared to those which are common today, Wade could not think of any. Quite to the contrary, he was impressed by the skill and craftsmanship that went into the medieval jokes — however crude the content itself might have been.

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"Another interesting conclusion is that this minstrel is not only very funny, but also capable of performing good poetry and crafting clever and rhetorically sophisticated stories," Wade observed.

In fact, that very absurdity is precisely why these verses were recorded, Wade speculates. Because the performers used absurdist humor, it might have been difficult to remember everything perfectly, so a written record could serve both as a script for the material's creator and as guidelines for future minstrels to follow. Wade also notes that, based on some of the notes and wording, it appears the Heege Manuscript included material meant to be delivered at large feasts and other events — often with audiences from a wide range of social classes.

After all, like the best comedians today, minstrels targeted everyone from the clergy and aristocrats to the peasants. While many of the references would have been topical and therefore have lost their meaning to present audiences, much of the humor is still relatable. Take "The Hunting of the Hare": The joke is that a group of peasants are trying to course a rabbit but get distracted by petty nonsense and fight each other instead (the wives ultimately have to show up to collect the dead and wounded).

"The violence here is pointless and the comedy is crude – jokes about incontinence, for instance," Wade writes. The locale is also nondescript enough that the performers could set the tale anywhere, including if necessary (and safe) at the very community where they were performing it.

There is also a parody sermon that gave royals a similarly unflattering treatment, one that seems to be a forebear of Monty Python's controversial "Mr. Creosote" sketch. In that fake sermon, the tale is told of three kings eating so much that their bellies burst open and 24 oxen come out, "playing at þe sword and bokelar, and þer wer laft no moo on lyve but .iij. red heyrynges."

Those three "reyd heryngus" are the first ever literary reference to "red herrings." The booklet even included a story called "The Battle of Brackonwet" that included Robin Hood as well as anthropomorphic pigs, bumblebees and bears. Like much modern comedy, the humor used by medieval bards seems to utilize silliness, grossness and even grotesque violence in clever ways. The minstrels clearly did not shy away from being offensive — or from being intelligent and subversive even as they cavorted around like children.

The text does not clear up all mysteries. For instance, it is notable that the performers who used the material in this manuscript could have been either professional travelers or local amateurs. While Wade can make informed speculations as to the author(s)' identity, he cannot know for sure. It could be one — or both.

"A 'professional' minstrel might have a day job and go gigging at night, and so be, in a sense, semi-professional, just as a 'traveling' minstrel may well be also 'local,' working a beat of nearby villages and generally known in the area," Wade writes. "On balance, the texts in this booklet suggest a minstrel of this variety: someone whose material includes several local place-names, but also whose material is made to travel, with the lack of determinacy designed to comically engage audiences regardless of specific locale. In functional and structural ways, then, these texts seem especially suited to the trade of minstrelsy."

If nothing else, the study proves that minstrels did more than share dramatic epics like Robin Hood or those of chivalrous royalty and knights.

"Of course, this is not to question the prospect that medieval minstrels performed romances, or drama, or Robin Hood ballads, but rather that the witnesses preserved by Heege expand the parameters of a performance repertoire beyond what we have hitherto deemed conventional, to include prose as well as verse; to include the satiric, ironic, and nonsensical; the topical, the interactive, the meta-fictional and meta-comedic," Wade writes. "The picture that emerges is one of a performer's willingness to poke fun of audiences across the spectrum of estates hierarchy within individual performance pieces."