The French
How far back does ironic humor toward the French go? Well, at least as far back as this literary work. The narrator’s opinion of what France has to offer the British tourist is less than lofty, characterizing the country’s culture as one which collectively seeks:
“to esteem of the pox as a pimple, to wear a velvet patch on their face, and walk melancholy with their arms folded.”
Make Him an Offer
How far back do Mafia jokes about Italy go? Well, perhaps not quite as far back as this work, but it is kind of hard to be sure. The author’s ironic zinging of Italy doesn’t even simply skirt the allusion to the very word Mafia like The Godfather, but even so the connection seems there:
“It is now a privy note amongst the better sort of men, when they would set a singular mark or brand on a notorious villainy, to say, he hath been in Italy.”
“Acolastus, the prodigal child”
The narrator reserves some of his most caustic irony for use against a performance of a play about the return of a prodigal child performed by a most highly regarded university. This institute of higher learning has already been the whipping boy for the narrator’s sarcasm for a couple of pages before the review of the play commences and he manages to combine all is loathing of the entire experience into one far-reaching swing of the blade:
“The only thing they did well was the prodigal child’s hunger, most of their scholars being hungerly kept, & surely you would have said they had been brought up in hogs’ academy to learn to eat acorns if you had seen how sedulously they fell to them.”
Christianity
Christianity takes quite the ironic beating throughout the narrative. The narrative is not shy about his own feelings on the subject nor is he miserly when it comes to spreading the wealth of ironic shame. Anabaptists, Puritans, Catholics as well as John of Leyden and Martin Luther all fall under the same umbrella of hypocrisy. And yet, he seems not altogether willing to raise the blame to the next logical level. All things considered, God and His boy come off pretty unscathed:
“When Christ said the kingdom of heaven must suffer violence, He meant not the violence of long babbling prayers, nor the violence of tedious invective sermons without wit, but the violence of faith, the violence of good works, the violence of patient suffering.”
Doctors
Doctors also share in the esteem of being a source of humor both for modern writers of ironic comedy and those operating in the past. What’s odd about this is that doctors of today have almost nothing in common with doctors of yesteryear except for that most important of ties that bind: they love money now and they loved money then:
“Miserable is that mouse that lives in a physician’s house; Tantalus lives not so hunger-starved in hell as she doth there. Not the very crumbs that fall from his table, but Zachary sweeps together, and of them moulds up a manna. Of the ashy parings of his bread he would make conserve of chippings. Out of bones, after the meat was eaten off, he would alchemize an oil that he sold for a shilling a dram. His snot and spittle a hundred times he hath put over to his apothecary for snow-water.”
