Fun And Frolic Poem by gershon hepner

Fun and frolic, fashion, flash,
lechery and chamber pots,
lots of women seeking cash
from the men who have the hots,
copious vomiting and shit,
all are subjects that amused
eighteenth century type Brit,
clearly then as now confused
by the mores that prevailed.
As in Eden, what’s illicit
when depicted never failed
to excite when made explicit.
Everybody who is jolly
loves a faux pas that’s a whopper,
wisdom less esteemed than folly
in a world that’s prim and proper.

William Grimes review Vic Gatrell’s “Sex and Satire in Eighteenth Century London” (“Jolly Old London but Definitely Not Prim and Proper, ” NYT, December 29,2006) :
Laughter may be universal, but what provokes it is not. Even within a culture, humor can change drastically over a relatively short period. This truth is abundantly documented in “City of Laughter, ” Vic Gatrell’s study of comic prints produced in London during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a period he deems the golden age of satire. The humor on display in the prints of James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, and George Cruikshank — the big three in Mr. Gatrell’s pantheon — was often coarse, bawdy, scatological and obscene. Private parts were on graphic display. Chamber pots and their contents stood front and center. Prostitutes cavorted with princes. Everything that the readers of Jane Austen regarded as private or shameful was shown in living color, on large, beautifully printed sheets hung in the windows of dealers for all London to see, and to laugh at. Mr. Gatrell, a professor of British history at the University of Essex and the author of “The Hanging Tree, ” regards the approximately 20,000 satiric prints published between 1770 and 1830 as social documents. In many cases they are also very funny jokes, but more usefully for Mr. Gatrell they provide visual clues to understanding the way that Londoners saw themselves and the world around them. “No other city was so dynamic, free and uncensored, and nowhere else were the comedies of snobbery and emulation played out and ridiculed so determinedly, ” he writes. The excesses of the rich, the corruption of the political elite and the absurdities of fashion provided rich material for comic artists, who, thanks to virtually nonexistent libel laws, could fire away at will. Nothing was sacred, and no one was safe, least of all the royal family….
Mr. Gatrell pays close attention to the subgenre known as debauchery prints, which usually depicted young clubmen and prominent political figures at table or tearing up the town. Copious vomiting, urination, erotic play and bad behavior of every sort figured prominently in these prints, but such scenes were offered as comic spectacles rather than moral lessons. Prostitution tended to be depicted in a manner that was “comically upbeat rather than judgmental.” Women were assumed to be just as hungry for sex as their male pursuers. One of the more fascinating social changes that Mr. Gatrell traces is the gradual refusal to laugh at jokes that convulsed the typical English citizen of the 18th century. Tobias Smollett’s “Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, ” first published in 1751, contained a wealth of surefire scatological material and jokes about drilling holes in chamber pots. Most of them had to be deleted in the second edition, published a mere six years later, probably, Mr. Gatrell theorizes, to accommodate a growing female readership. By the time Jane Austen put pen to paper, manners had been domesticated and humor tamed, as an increasingly influential middle class defined itself in opposition to both the laboring classes and the aristocracy. Just try to imagine Mister Darcy doing cow imitations, dandling a whore on his knee or breaking wind loudly at the dinner table.



12/29/06