If the clubs and coffee houses of Addison and Steele constitute a bourgeois public sphere, one in which rank is suspended for a free and equal exchange between gentlemen, carnival, in which much the same suspension of rank occurs, figures in some ways as its plebeian counterpart. As a counterculture that is simultaneously real and ideal, actual yet future-oriented, it represents a utopian domain of freedom, community, equality, and superabundance, in which all status, norms, privileges, and prohibitions are temporarily put on hold. In their place, a free, frank idiom of the streets and marketplaces is unleashed, diminishing the distance between individuals and liberating them from the requirements of decency and etiquette. The barriers of caste, profession, property, and age are overturned. Folly becomes a form of festive wisdom in this cornucopian world. Truth and authority are remolded into a Mardi Gras dummy, a comic monster that the crowd rends to pieces. Laughter becomes a new style of communication, the material sign of a transformed set of social relations. There is, as Mikhail Bakhtin obverves, “the potentiality of a friendly world, of the golden age, of carnival truth. Man returns to himself” (Rabelais and His World).

Yet the discourse of carnival is double-edged. If it is in search of a transfigured world of liberty, fellowship, and equality, it mocks, lampoons, and disfigures in order to attain it. Its critical and affirmative functions are thus at one. Popular revelry is a riotously deconstructive force, collapsing hierarchies, travestying sacred truths, deflating exalted doctrines, and mischievously inverting high and low, but this disruptive activity is all in the cause of fun and friendship. This great orgy of iconoclasm is a matter of both violence and comradeship, cursing and praising, slander and festivity. It affirms and denies, buries and resurrects in a single gesture. If there are gargantuan feasts and erotic couplings, there is also an outrageous vein of obloquy, of the kind one finds often enough in Rabelais:

May St. Anthony sear you with his erysipelatous fire...may Mahomet’s disease whirl you in epileptic jitters...may the festers, ulcers and chancres of every purulent pox infect, scathe, mangle and rend you, entering your bumgut as tenuously as mercuralized cow’s hair...and may you vanish into an abyss of brimstone and fire, like Sodom and Gomorrah, if you do not believe implicitly what I am about to relate in the present Chronicles.

Rabelaisian cursing is inexhaustibly fertile, exuberant, and inventive. Yet this language is Janus-faced, too, veering from calumny to celebration. As Bakhtin remarks, carnivalesque discourse praises while abusing and abuses while praising. There is no question of superiority in its scoldings, not least since there are no spectators in the sphere of carnival to condescend to its participants. Instead, the whole world, in principle at least, pitches in. It is humanity itself that is on stage, a stage that is coextensive with the auditorium.

“The satirist whose laughter is negative,” Bakhtin remarks, “places himself above the object of his mockery,” but at carnival time the populace taunt themselves, as subjects and objects of satire in a single body. Carnival degrades and debases, then, but in a way that is hard to distinguish from affirmation. “To degrade,” writes Bakhtin, means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerative one.

It is this ambivalently fruitful and denigratory mode to which Bakhtin gives the name of “grotesque realism.” “The essence of the grotesque,” he writes, “is precisely to present a contradictory and double-faced fullness of life. Negation and destruction (death of the old) are included as an essential phase, inseparable from affirmation, from the birth of something new and better.” One recalls that the word “comedy” derives from Comus, an ancient fertility god who signifies perpetual rejuvenation. Carnivalesque comedy is a form of vulgar materialism, one that reroots its subjects in the earth and in doing so allows them to fructify. It signifies “the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract,” but only so that its true value may be extracted from this mystical shell. One can lay waste to the world as savagely as one likes, convinced that matter, along with the great body of the populace, is imperishable, and that each act of annihilation is simply the prelude to a new birth. If the earth is a grave, it is also a womb. The immortality of the collective body is reflected in the inviolability of the individual one, as men and women are ritually beaten and buffeted but in cartoon-like fashion remain magically unscathed.

The vigilant reader may detect a certain idealizing strain in Bakhtin’s extravagant hymn of praise to the common folk. Carnival would seem a world that has banished tragedy. There is an acceptance of death, to be sure, but only as a springboard to new life. Agony and affliction are not confronted as realities in themselves, in all their terror and intractability. In this sense, the carnivalesque spirit is one of several modes by which death can be disavowed. It is not a question of salvaging value from a pain that remains insistent, but of converting that pain into joy.

There are other reasons to be skeptical of Bakhtin’s case. For one thing, we have rather less reason in our own epoch to be persuaded that our species is imperishable. For another thing, carnival may be a fictionalized form of insurrection, but it also provides a safety valve for such subversive energies. In this sense, its closest parallel today is professional sports, the abolition of which would no doubt be the shortest route to bloody revolution. Finally, we may note that Bakhtin’s censure of the medieval church (“laughter was eliminated from religious cult”) overlooks the carnivalesque features of the Christian Gospel.

Many a commentator has observed that, though Jesus weeps, he does not laugh, a reticence that might seem in line with the Book of Ecclesiastes’s grim insistence that “sorrow is better than laughter, for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made glad. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth”(7:3–4). It is true that the Jesus portrayed by the New Testament is hardly remarkable for his side-splitting sense of fun, having as he did a fair amount to feel glum about. It will be a sign that his kingdom is imminent, however, when we see the poor being filled with good things and the rich sent empty away, a classic carnivalesque inversion. Unlike the reversals and upendings of carnival, this will prove more than a temporary affair. In The Fool: His Social and Literary History (1966), Enid Welsford records that at vespers on the medieval Feast of Fools, the gospel words “He has put down the mighty from their seat and exalted the lowly” were sung over and over again, as the prelude to a mischievous parody of the Mass. Jesus and his plebeian comrades do no work, are accused of drunkenness and gluttony, roam footloose and propertyless on the margins of the conventional social order, and like the free spirits of carnival take no thought for tomorrow. As a sick joke of a Savior (the notion of a crucified Messiah would have struck the ancient Jews as a moral obscenity), Jesus enters Jerusalem, the stronghold of Roman imperial power, on the back of a donkey, and having been deserted by his comrades will be left to face an ignominious death, one reserved by the Romans for political rebels alone. Yet the folly of the cross proves wiser than the wisdom of the philosophers. The intimidatory power of the Law is overthrown, the meek inherit the earth, the sublime becomes human flesh and blood, the most sacred truths are cast in a plain idiom intended for fishermen and small farmers, and weakness proves the only durable form of strength.

Carnivalesque bathos lies at the core of Christianity, as the awesome question of salvation comes down to the earthly, everyday business of tending the sick and feeding the hungry. Luke’s gospel promises that those who weep now, meaning the afflicted and dispossessed, will laugh later—though it also reverses this reversal by warning that those who laugh now, meaning the well-heeled and self-satisfied, will weep later. The profound ease and euphoria of spirit known as divine grace manifests itself among other things in human mercy, friendship, and forgiveness. In the Eucharist as in carnival, flesh and blood become a medium of communion and solidarity between human beings. Yet if the New Testament commends a laid-back life free of anxiety, in which one lives like the lilies of the field and turns one’s goods over to the poor, it also portrays its protagonist as wielding a sword, one that enforces an absolute division between those who seek justice and fellowship and those who turn their backs on this ruthlessly uncompromising campaign. Like carnival, the Gospel combines the joy of liberation with a certain violence and intransigence of spirit. Jesus’ curses, directed at those respectable religious types who fasten extra burdens on the backs of those already sorely oppressed, are at least as terrifying as Rabelais’, if not quite as entertaining. There is also a vein of comédie noire in Christianity. God sends his only son to save us from our plight, and how do we show our gratitude? We kill him! It is an appalling display of bad manners.

This essay is adapted from portions of the author’s new book, Humor, published this month by Yale University Press. Used by permission.