Is there an ethics particular to laughing at the Middle Ages? What are the stakes of making the medieval past an object of postmedieval humor, and can the long dead of the Middle Ages laugh back at modernity?

A focus on the ethics of humor as an instrument of social tolerance or exclusion has gained momentum over the past two decades, with an increased analysis of how globalization and multiculturalism have brought different ethnic, cultural, and religious communities into daily proximity with one another. Because of the emergence of bigoted humor out of ideologies of ethnic hatred, misogyny, and homophobia, and because of what humor theorist Ken Willis calls its “consequences […] within living memory,” laughter is regarded as a practice with direct and often urgent ramifications for the present and the future. The scholarly location of humor in the domains of the present and the social appeals to the ethical injunction against ridiculing the experience of others and the commitment to the social inclusion of persecuted peoples. In their attempts to identify the line between humor and offense, humor scholars have been concerned with the social dynamics between the subject (or “teller”) of the comic text, its object, and its audience, as well as with assessing the aptness of the so-called “superiority” and “relief” theories, in which humor either has the effect of establishing the laughing group's superiority over the laughed-at group via ridicule, or conversely, performs the more benign function of diffusing social tension by channeling and hence warding off fear of the laughed-at group.