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 Cruik-shank — the big three in 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.
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 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.
About half the satiric prints produced in this period dealt with political matters. Gatrell is more interested in the other half, the prints that dealt with gossip, fashion, manners and sexual relations, although the two halves often overlap, especially in the many prints devoted to the sexual escapades of the prince regent, the future George IV. Taken as a whole these social prints depict a society in which the well-born mingled easily with the lower orders, whose speech and behavior they freely adopted, a society that tended to laugh at rather than condemn drunkenness, lechery and the idle pursuit of what the early-19th-century novelist Pierce Egan called "fun, frolic, fashion and flash."
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 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, Gatrell theorizes, to accommodate a growing female readership.
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