35 Hilarious Medieval Memes That Just Might Make You Laugh So Hard You’ll Spit Out Your Ale

These hilarious memes were shared by an Imgur user known as JebidiahBeetus. This person is a seasoned community member who has been sharing quality content since 2015. In that time, they have racked up over 2.1 million internet points and many Imgur trophies.

This person’s content is strictly oriented at memes, and most of their posts don’t go unnoticed. One of their best-received recent posts is titled “Meme dump 393: Knight Time,” and, as you probably know by now, it’s all about the Middle Ages. Since it was posted around two weeks ago, it has been viewed over 45,000 times, and, if we had to guess, at least as many times, it has received laughs too.

Humor has accompanied humans for the longest time and has been used throughout most, if not all, of our history. It played a role in shaping lives even in seemingly dreary times like the Middle Ages, building communities and making people’s days a little bit brighter.

According to the Smithsonian, even what we now know as standup comedy, which may seem like a relatively new thing, might actually be quite a bit older than it appears. At least, that’s what newly discovered evidence points to.

The article tells us of medieval performers and entertainers called minstrels, with the first people of this profession appearing around the 12th century. While their activities also included juggling, acrobatics, and music playing, they were best known for their storytelling. However, until now, there has been little information on what their performances were actually about.

Recently, a medieval comedy routine has been discovered in the manuscript of a tutor known as Richard Heege, which gives us a nice good glimpse into the world of live comedy of the Middle Ages. The papers had already been acquired quite some time ago. However, their studies were primarily focused on the artifact’s significance and physical characteristics, missing some of the other “treasures” they were “guarding.” 

Written inside the manuscript is a wide variety of comedic acts like satirical anecdotes of heavy drinking virtues and absurd tales about battles that never really happened. The quality of this material was certainly high, too, as, besides being actually funny, it featured rhetorically sophisticated stories and superb poetry.

Discovering such a thing is a true rarity, as many minstrels were usually illiterate and probably didn’t see many financial benefits from preserving their acts. Instead, they passed down their jokes through oral tradition. But on occasion, which appears to be the case here, the material was just too demanding to memorize and recite by heart, so putting it down on paper was necessary.

This content discovered in Richard Heege’s manuscript was not originally written by him, as the man likely copied it from a minstrel’s repertoire book when he worked as a tutor for a family somewhere in Derbyshire. However, this fact doesn’t make the discovery any less significant.

Finding these good similarities between us and our predecessors and realizing where the things we know now came from is always interesting and exciting. After all, we’re not so different, even if modern technologies might make us seem so. And if you need proof, the comedy in the form of these memes is exactly it.

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