Legitimate question: I want to get into some very early forms

Rabelais is the pinnacle of what you seek.

>>7593444
If fart and dick jokes can be found in high-brow centuries old classic literature, does this mean crude humor is the most patrician humor?

>>7593444
The Golden Ass by Apuleius is genuine historical giggle-smirk-tier.

>>7593444
The man you are asking for is Aristophanes. Then there are Plautus and Terence, but they are Romans and we have very little left of the interim period.
As for Renaissance writers, there are Molière and of course Shakespeare. Rabelais and Cervantes were novelists but the dick jokes are plenty in their works too.

You should be able to work your way up from there

>>7593444
>>7593444
you understand humour too narrowly, you have to understand humor as one understands happy or sad or good or bad or this or that or mist or nats, its all across the tradgedies of the greekers, so you have to see them not in a lol way but in a thinkers laugh way, today its all wiffs and narfs but sometimes it gets to the smarts like bakcthney. All irish jokes are about excriment, but they are told brillantly. Moby Dick si a story of good examples, read with a mind of not a teacher's pet. Shakespeare was funny, know it

>>7593484
oh and I forgot Boccaccio

also, >>7593483

>>7593444
Shakespeare for one

Get some Aristophanes lad

>>7593486
So what you're saying is that humour wasn't restricted to comedies and that a lot of the humour I should expect from earlier works is less "haha" funny and more contemplative, abstract or just an appreciation for absurdity?

>>7593457
>>7593483
>>7593484
>>7593488
>>7593490
>>7593491
Thanks, m8s, certainly going to look into all of these fellas.

More recommendations/suggestions are certainly appreciated if anyone has more.

I hear The Cantebury Tales is meant to be good for early humour, I plan on reading that this year sometime.

Not necessarily early literature, and I guess it's arguable if it's considerably classic status too, but because this is a thread about crude gags (I don't think we really see enough threads on /lit/ regarding comedies or humor) : Pynchon uses a lot of dick jokes and dirty limericks in Gravity's Rainbow.

>>7593484
>molière
>rennaisance
Please get your arbitrary terms right

Bumping because i would also like to know where to find the dick jokes in ancient literature

Not that old but The Decameron is full of dick and sex jokes and intentionally humorous euphemisms.

Let's be honest, novelists are not comedians nor should they be regarded as such and speaking up to them as such is the equivalent of praising the literary undertones in norm Macdonalds stand up. Sophomoric all around.

>>7593627
What about when a novel or a play has genuinely fantastic comic timing and its humour is spot on? I know a fair few novels that have had me laughing frequently as I read them.

>>7593627
> novelists are not comedians

Some are.

>>7593615
> The Decameron
> not that old

Wasn't it Plato or Aristotle that would fire disses at the other with crude remarks of their time? Or some philosophy feud at the time idk

>>7593667
I know this has no merit at all because i can't site it, but I read a quote from a famous novelist saying something to the effect of, 'the worst thing for a novelist is to be classified as a comedic writer because people will always be reading your future works with the expectations of great laughs. so much better to have your readers expect nothing of the sort and be surprised by the comedy'

What humour is there to be found in earlier literature than the greeks and romans?

Look up the Priapus Poems, OP.
This is what you're after.

A collection of dick poems dedicated to Priapus, Dick God.
They're all really funny and crude as hell. Those Romans, man.

El Buscon by Quevedo

>>7593444
Ulysses also has a lot of references to pussy and big tiddies, depending on how you interpret all that deflowering and mountain shit.

>>7593724
Well, OP is looking for fucking greeks and Summerians.

I'd have thought it'd be obvious but Marquis De Sade's 120 Days of Sodom is pretty delicious for the crude and vulgarity, and surprisingly - despite how grotesque it is - it's also amusing.

Obv. not as old as the greeks, like, but if you're up for some good absurdist literature, Mikhail Bulgakov should be essential.

Would recommend Heart of a Dog first. IMO, Bulgakov is a good entry-point into the russians.

>>7593444
chaucer, my man

>>7593444

In every great work of literature survives a subtle smile directed at the smallness of things.

More directly, Orlando Furioso for the mockery of medieval customs. And Eugene Onegin for Pushkin's irony towards his own inconsequence (which later proved to be wrong, his laurel wreath will shine upon men until the end of the world. but the point stands)

>>7593947

Even if it was from Saint Bloom this statement would be ridiculous and wrong. There's more to comedy than 'he he he' and unless he's talking about beach readers and Oprah's book club members, I'm pretty sure readers can make a work stand by itself and appreciate it for what it is.

###1: never underestimate readers' sensibility

>>7593941
did philosophers ever sink so low to crudely remark on their opposition?

>>7595818
Mike Birbiglia isn't even that funny.

the exeter book has some ambiguous riddles, like this one.

I am a wondrous creature for women in expectation, a service for neighbors. I harm none of the citizens except my slayer alone. My stem is erect, I stand up in bed, hairy somewhere down below. A very comely peasant's daughter, dares sometimes, proud maiden, that she grips at me, attacks me in my redness, plunders my head, confines me in a stronghold, feels my encounter directly, woman with braided hair. Wet be that eye.

>>7595890
Appolonius of Rhodes and Callimachus were famous rivals, they mocked eachother incessantly. Can't remember it being crude though

>>7593486
3/10. Too straightforward. One must have a mind of utmost subtlety even to mimic FW.

>>7597428
No mimickry, go a cry mea river of tears and go bossom the trees you slimy hinkjack holder of the lackcows a cuckholding chair of a norse swamp root.

>>7593492
Yes!

>>7593484
Moliere isn't renaissance and he wasn't very crude, though he was funny.