"Re-Imagining the Class Clown: Chaucer's Clowning Clerics"
Smilie, Ethan K., and Kipton D. Smilie.
“Re-Imagining the Class Clown: Chaucer’s Clowning Clerics.” Interdisciplinary
Humanities, vol. 31, no. 3, 2014, p. 32-52.
In “Re-Imagining the Class Clown” by Ethan and Kipton Smilie, they argue that Geoffrey Chaucer writes “one of the few significant portrayals of class clowns before the twentieth century” in the characters of the Reeve and the Miller (32-33). They begin their essay by talking about class clowns in pop culture before diving into specific research done in schools about student behavior. Specifically, they bring up Michael Apple who suggested class clowns occur in schools and workplaces in order to disrupt the social norm (33-4). Smilie also brings up the study of students in an industrial town by Paul Willis which argues that “lower class” students were more likely to disrupt social norms than “higher class” academic students (34). The authors connect this with The Canterbury Tales by suggesting Chaucer included the Reeve and the Miller to disrupt the social norms of the rest of the stories and say, “These ancestors of today’s class clowns share fully their power and motivation to resist and disrupt” (38).
Kathryn
Anderson-Albright
