Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

taking laughter seriously 147
the serious, often satirical or moralizing poems that constitute most of
the volume, including an extensive group organized according to the
seven deadly sins. 4 Finally, an ordinance of 1559 specifically distinguishes
between allegorical plays or moralities and other things performed “in
God’s honor,” and plays for the entertainment and honest recreatie of the
people. 5
Thus, we may doubt that such farces as the Clucht van plaijerwater were
intended, as Pleij characterizes a fifteenth-century Netherlandish boerd
with a comparable plot, to oªer “contrasting propaganda for the world
as God intended it: with order, harmony and true love in the family, and
the priest as intermediary between earthly life and heaven,” 6 and it is even
less likely that they were understood as such by contemporary audiences. 7
Similarly, the debate on the relative merits of bagpipe and lute in the tafelspel
Bot Verstant en Cloucken Geest was surely intended simply in ’t sot. And the
same might be said about many other tafelspelen and kluchten that were performed
on festive occasions, including the Twelfth Night tafelspel that, as
we have seen, was written with the stated intention to banish “all heavy
spirits,” and the two kluchten that were received with such hilarity in the
great square at Brussels in 1549, to the disapproval of the austere Dr.
Kram. We must beware, it seems, of taking laughter too seriously.
To place Bruegel’s art within the “laugh culture” of his time is not to
reduce him to the status of the Drolle Piet or the “Peasant Bruegel” of earlier
centuries. It cannot be denied that a significant number of Bruegel’s
works are in ’t wijs, even if they do not exhibit the metaphysical profundity
or abstruse symbolism so often and so enthusiastically attributed to them.
Bruegel gave fresh and often moving interpretations of the old Christian
themes in such works as the Massacre of the Innocents, Christ Carrying the Cross,
and Death of the Virgin; the Blind Leading the Blind expands the parable into a
tragic view of the human condition. Finally, the Triumph of Death, in which
the dead swarm from their graves to snatch the living from their daily business
and pastimes, presents an image of the end of time immeasurably more
immediate and poignant than any Bosch had ever achieved. 8
The same is true of many of the drawings that Bruegel made for the