The diverse characters in Chaucer's tales discuss a variety of subjects in different manners and ways, just as the other, “real” later medieval English people surely did, and like Chaucer's characters, certainly a good part of them also “laughed and played.” As the quotation above from the Canterbury Tales suggests, discussions among more common people were probably filled with more laughter than there is to be found in all the treatises, manuals and chronicles more often studied. In this chapter I will scrutinise later medieval traces of laughter concerning same-sex sexuality. Laughing at the matter may have amused people, as well as storytellers and jesters, and the stories and jests written down were undoubtedly shared willingly; laughter was entertaining, but also relieving. The laugh resulting from samesex sexual themes was usually of a very sinister kind; as such, it appears to have been a yet another means of condemnation. Reliable sources here are few, but there are some, including jests, evidence of mockery, comical pictures, and pieces of poetry.

In the first section I will consider laughter as another means of dealing with same-sex sexual matters in later medieval England. My argument is based on an understanding of laughter as a means of releasing uneasiness concerning issues regarded as unfitting within accepted ways of life and orders of things. In the case of same-sex sexuality, the disturbance of gender boundaries reveals itself to have been a significant problem. Not surprisingly, a good part of the period's laughter in general seems to have occurred in relation to sexual matters. Laughter was also a central tool in creating, forming, and understandings of sexuality considered unnatural; laughing at sin against nature also meant laughing at sex against nature, sexual behaviour outside of its “natural” place. Simultaneously, the laugh was also on gender, and especially on the reversion of gender roles. The primary material used here consists of excerpts of texts and a few drawings describing or implicating same-sex sexuality by means of jokes and the grotesque.