How Is Crude Humor Used In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales?

A large portion of educated persons in the medieval era were clergy, and as such the majority of surviving manuscripts are religious texts, manuals, or letters. Secular works were written, but even non-religious texts contained elements of religion. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales revolves around a religious pilgrimage and contains church men and women, but the text itself is not considered religious. In fact, parts of Chaucer’s work are often labeled as obscene, which is not overly common in medieval literature. Several riddles found in the Exeter Book also fall under this label. However, even less information can be found on the possible author of the Exeter Book than on Chaucer. As Krapp and Dobbie point out there are still debates as to whether the entirety of the book was even the work of one scribe, or if it can be attributed to multiple. It is generally …show more content…
The Exeter Book’s sexual riddles were not included in a monastic text by any accident. Crude humor remains popular today, as seen by games like Cards Against Humanity or What’s Yours Like?, where the funniest sexual or pornographic insinuations win the game. While the monks may have warned, and been warned, against such crass humor it does little good if they are unaware of what it is like when it does show up. In fact, these double-entendre riddles may not have even come into existence were it not for the taboo placed on sexual language and actions in both monastic life and everyday society. Or it could be as simple as the fact that the answer was innocent. The riddle itself may conjure up sexual imagery but when the answer is revealed a lesson was learned. The embarrassment of not finding a non-sexual answer is paired with the potential humor from the response after the innocent answer is revealed. To an extent this disguises the riddle so that it is less taboo than if the true answer was