Canterbury Tales tells many stories from medieval literature and provides a great variety of comic tales. Geoffrey Chaucer injects many tales of humor into the novel. Chaucer provides the reader with many light-hearted tales as a form of comic relief between many serious tales. The author interpolates humor into many tales, provides comic relief, and shows the reader a different type of humorous genre.
Geoffrey Chaucer provides humor in many of the tales from Canterbury Tales. The Miller’s Tale is one such tale. In the Miller’s Tale, a carpenter marries an eighteen-year-old girl named Alison. The carpenter also houses a cleric named Nicholas. The clever Nicholas tries to take advantage of the carpenter’s young wife while he goes away. Alison begins to like Nicholas and tells him that if he can trick her husband, then she will make love to him. Another man, Absalom attempts to capture Alison’s love, but “Alison loved clever Nicholas so much that Absalom could go blow his horn elsewhere.”(Canterbury Tales 65). Nicholas comes up with a plan to trick the carpenter. He tells the husband that he knows another great flood will come and that he, the carpenter, and Alison will be safe if the carpenter builds three separate barrels and hangs them from the ceiling where they can climb to safety. On that night, all three climb into the barrels and the carpenter immediately falls asleep, due to the exhaustion from all of his work. Alison and Nicholas climb down and go into the carpenter’s bed. Absalom appears at the window at midnight. Absalom demands a kiss from Alison, and Alison says she will kiss him if he leaves immediately. Then,”…she thrust her ass out the window. Absalom, knowing no better kissed it enthusiastically before realizing the trick.”(Canterbury Tales 71). Absalom then goes back into the town and gets a hot colter and returns to the house, and again he demands a kiss from Alison. This time, Nicholas decides to play the joke. “Nicholas quickly raised the window and thrust his ass far out…Nicholas let fly a fart with a noise as great as a clap of thunder, so that Absalom was almost overcome by the force of it. But he was ready with his hot iron and he smote Nicholas in the middle of his ass.”(Canterbury Tales 73). Nicholas immediately yells for water, and, hearing somebody yell for water, the carpenter wakes up, cuts the ropes thinking the flood has come, and crashes to the floor. The Miller’s Tale represents a perfect example of Chaucer’s humor. The author injects many humorous events into the plot and ties all of the events together at the end. The last part of the story provides humor as each event leads to another equally humorous and ironic event, and the story ends with the ignorant husband being taken advantage of. Such ironic situations add to the humor of Chaucer’s tales.
