“If I had a shilling…”

Abstract

Salvatore Attardo and Victor Raskin’s General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH, 1991) offers a useful foundation to determine whether something as universal as humour shows similar structures across different medieval genres. While the GTVH was designed in such a way that it can be applied to any humorous text, it seems extremely beneficial to apply it to two texts with similar themes to examine their perceived funniness. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, in this paper the GTVH is applied to the Middle English fabliau Dame Sirith and Hans Sachs’ German Schwank­erzählung “Der fahrendt Schuler mit dem Teufelbannen,” which both focus on the topic of financial gain through unintended involvement in adultery of their respective protagonists. This is done in order to discuss their humorous potential, and to determine, by means of the notion of joke similarity, whether this potential is realised through similar structures across the two genres.