Terrible puns and filthy limericks: the Victorian sense of humour

Summary

Podcast Summary: Terrible puns and filthy limericks: the Victorian sense of humour

HistoryExtra Podcast – February 13, 2026
Host: David Musgrove
Guest: Dr. Bob Nicholson (Lecturer in 19th-century history, Edge Hill University)

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Main Theme Overview

This episode explores the diverse and often misunderstood world of Victorian humour. Dr. Bob Nicholson dives into what made 19th-century Britons laugh, challenging stereotypes of Victorian prudishness. The discussion navigates terrible puns, conundrum competitions, the clandestine world of filthy limericks, and the circulation of jokes across classes and continents, ultimately revealing a comic scene as lively and varied as our own.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Defining the "Victorian Sense of Humour"

• Hard to Define: Victorian humour was as broad and varied as today’s, ranging from highbrow satire to slapstick and vulgar jokes.
• Obsession with Puns: Puns (“laboured, torturous puns”) were especially loved, often taking the form of “conundrum jokes” that acted as both puzzles and entertainment ([01:16]).
  • Quote: “They absolutely love wordplay to a degree that I think for us now we would look at and think, blimey, these are some pretty laboured, torturous puns.” — Bob Nicholson ([01:24])

Examples of Victorian Pun Jokes ([02:21–03:14])

• “When do we possess a vegetable timepiece? When we get a potato clock.”

• “If he were to kill a conversational goose, what vegetable would it allude to? Asparagus [as-per-a-goose].”

• Conundrum competitions (akin to talent shows) were popular; townsfolk would submit their best puns to be judged and awarded, with winners published in newspapers.

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2. Victorians and Bodily Humour – Respectability vs. Private Vice

• Victorian reputation for prudishness is nuanced:
  • Publicly, humour about bodily functions became taboo compared to the openly bawdy Georgian era.
  • Joke books and mainstream media were heavily edited for decency.
  • Example: Successive Victorian editions of Joe Miller’s Jests cut jokes about sex, urination, and other bodily matters ([06:42–12:49]).

Notable (Censored) Examples:

• Joke about lovers being caught in a field (“no harm, we are only going to propagate”).

• The classic “a little thing” will make us laugh (implied penis joke).

• In private, however, Victorians did tell lewd jokes — dinner parties among elites and publications like The Pearl (a pornographic magazine) preserved filthy limericks.

  • Filthy Limerick Example ([12:51–14:05]):

    • “There was a young lady of Hitchin / Who was scratching her C--- in the kitchen...”

  • Bob: “The idea of [Victorians] joking about those kind of things... seems so unfamiliar to us, how we imagine the Victorians...” ([13:41])

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3. Humour Across Social Classes and Genders

• Most surviving evidence is from middle-class, male, London-centric sources (e.g., Punch).
• Humour reflected and reinforced class boundaries; Punch often "punched down" at working-class subjects, while magazines like Titbits mocked the upper class.
• Gendered humour: Many jokes about women’s fashion, but also men as butts of jokes.
• The folk humour of women and working classes is harder to reconstruct due to lack of surviving sources ([18:36], [25:45]).

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4. Sources, Preservation, and Performance of Humour

• Main Sources: Newspapers (industrial-scale joke publishing), magazines, private diaries, and rare early phonograph recordings ([18:36–21:25]).
• Music Hall & Comic Lectures:
  • The music hall featured performers blending comic songs and spoken jokes (early form of stand-up).
  • “Comic lectures” used lectures as a format for joke-filled performances—precursors to modern PowerPoint comedy. Artemus Ward is cited as a pioneer ([21:37–24:07]).
  • Quote: “Joke telling was everywhere. It isn’t just contained into these sort of small areas that we might think of as comedy.” — Bob Nicholson ([24:37])

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5. Debunking Queen Victoria’s "Not Amused" Reputation

• The famous line “we are not amused” is, at best, apocryphal.

• Her diaries reveal she laughed frequently at physical mishaps and dinner table anecdotes ([27:47]).

  • Memorable Moment: Admiral’s ship-wreck story misheard as a comment on his sister’s “barnacles” — left Victoria “in hysterics... shoulders shaking, weeping with laughter” ([29:18]).

• Public persona required “dignity of a sovereign”; private Victoria enjoyed ordinary, even crude, humour.

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6. Social Boundaries, Censorship, and "Victorian Cancellation"

• Jokes about bodily functions, scurrilous gossip, and “improper company” could get you censured.
• Music hall stars skirted the line with innuendo and faced suppression by censors and organizations for “public morals.”
  • Victorian “cancellation” played out as suppression of acts or printed material ([31:32]).

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7. Going "Viral" in the Victorian Age: Transatlantic Humour

• Jokes spread via “cut and paste” in newspapers—akin to retweets.

• American humour columns were a staple of British periodicals; “viral” jokes could travel the world, crossing cultures and being adapted locally ([33:18]).

  • Example: “You kick the bucket, we do the rest.” (mining town undertaker; parody of Kodak’s “You press the button, we do the rest.”) — spread from America across Britain and into political speeches.

• Quote: “Comedy circulates on a global scale in the 19th century.” — Bob Nicholson ([33:18])

• American humour was seen as fresh and highbrow; British humour, as more laboured and slapstick.

  • Over time, these perceptions flipped ([36:53]).

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8. Victorian Humour vs. Other Eras

• Major themes (mother-in-law jokes, lawyers, romance mishaps) persisted through the Edwardian era and beyond.
• Some stock figures changed: e.g., the “milkman” as swindler (Victorian) vs. sexual predator (20th century).
• Over time, postwar society shed the most rigid respectability, humour becoming more direct and less mannered.
• Famous Cartoons Highlighting Change: Retelling of “the curate’s egg” joke, with modern bluntness replacing Victorian diplomacy ([39:25]).

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9. Closing: Favourite Victorian Joke

• Poet Joke (43:14):
  • “A man visits a pub, sees a poet being fed like a king, asks why. Landlord replies, ‘Hasn’t been published; won’t be until after he dies. We’re keeping him alive as long as we can.’”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with timestamps)

• “You kind of got to admire the dexterity of it, right, to construct puns like that.” — Bob Nicholson ([03:14])
• “Farts have been funny... throughout human history.” — Bob Nicholson ([06:45])
• “Those jokes were circulating... but they are not the kind of stuff you would hear in a mainstream musical or read in a magazine.” — Bob Nicholson ([13:41])
• “Comedy is such an ephemeral thing... when actually it’s really culturally important. We just haven’t always kept it.” — Bob Nicholson ([18:36])
• “The idea of them using that kind of language, joking about those kind of things... seems so unfamiliar to us, how we imagine the Victorians...” — Bob Nicholson ([13:41])
• “She supposedly, in that moment, is absolutely in hysterics... embarrassing moment for this admiral. But, I mean, you know, if that happened to me, I would laugh my head off at that...” — Bob Nicholson ([29:18])
• “American humour was considered more witty, more like black humour, whereas British humour was a bit more kind of laboured and slapstick at this point.” — Bob Nicholson ([36:53])
• “Humour does change, as it continues to change now. But... the things we laugh at in many cases are the same and they endure.” — Bob Nicholson ([42:09])

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• Victorian Obsession with Puns: [01:16–04:48]
• Victorian Taboo and Joke Book Censorship: [06:42–12:49]
• Filthy Victorian Limericks and Private Humour: [12:51–14:05]
• Sources and Recording Comedy: [18:36–21:25]
• Entertainment Venues and Pre-stand-up Comedy: [21:37–24:07]
• Queen Victoria’s True Sense of Humour: [27:47–31:03]
• Victorian Era "Cancellation"/Censorship: [31:32–33:06]
• Jokes Going Viral & US-UK Humour Exchange: [33:18–36:53]
• Evolution of Humour (Victorian to Modern): [39:25–42:09]
• Favourite Joke to Close: [43:14]

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Tone & Language

• The episode is lively, witty, and conversational, filled with historical anecdotes, personal asides, and plenty of groan-worthy puns. Dr. Nicholson shares both scholarly perspective and comic relief, while David Musgrove interjects with questions and (sometimes) appreciation for the jokes.

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For further exploration:

• Dr. Bob Nicholson (@DigiVictorian) researches 19th-century British and American popular culture.
• Listen for references to The Tiger Tamer Who Went to Sea and more on the HistoryExtra archive for related historical curiosities.

Transcript

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[Bob Nicholson]

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[Podcast Host / Narrator]

Queen Victoria was, so the famous story goes, not amused. But as Dr. Bob Nicholson reveals in this episode of the History Extra podcast, the long lived queen did have a sense of humor. So did her subjects. Speaking with David Musgrove, Bob explores what it was that made people laugh in the 19th century. And just a word of warning from me, this episode does contain some very strong language and adult humour. The first question that David asked was, what actually was the Victorian sense of humour?

[Bob Nicholson]

It's really hard to define the sense of humour of millions of people over a generation, just as it would be now. But when I look at Victorian comedy, I guess that there are certain recurring patterns or themes that they really liked. And the first one that you'll see when you look at their jokes is that they love puns. They absolutely love wordplay to a degree that I think for us now we would look at and think, blimey, these are some pretty laboured, torturous puns. But they do enjoy that kind of comedy. We can maybe talk more about their punning habits in a bit beyond that. I mean, Victorian humour comes in a wide variety of different forms, from incredibly kind of erudite and witty bits of satire through to the most kind of base form of slapstick, you know, somebody slipping on a banana skin. So I would say their sense of humour is pretty much as broad and varied as ours is, but there are some interesting differences and maybe one way that we could begin to unpick this is to say, well, how was their sense of humour different from the people who came before and the people who came later? And that's something that, yeah, we should maybe try and dig into in more detail.

[David Musgrove]

Okay, we will come back to that in just a second. I wonder, do you have any sort of bad pun that you might offer us?

[Bob Nicholson]

Yeah, I do. Oh, I could inflict loads on them. So there is a book published in, I think, the 1870s called puniana which is literally 300 pages of puns. Nothing else, just one liners. And they are absolutely eye wateringly torturous. So here's, I think, one of my favourites. They work better written down. So this is all right, we're already on a dodgy ground here, but here's the setup. When do we possess a vegetable timepiece? When we get a potato clock or get a potato clock.

[David Musgrove]

God.

[Bob Nicholson]

Imagine the tumbleweed blowing down the line between me and Dave at this point.

[David Musgrove]

That is week.

[Bob Nicholson]

Yeah. I mean, genuinely awful. Right. And it is one of the better ones. So, I mean, here's another one from the same book. If he were to kill a conversational goose, what vegetable would it allude to? Asparagus. Or asparagus.

[David Musgrove]

Actually, I quite like that one.

[Bob Nicholson]

That one's all right. Yeah. I think, like, because I've read so many hundreds of these now that I feel like my own sense of humour has been kind of irreparably damaged to the point where I can't really tell which of them are funny anymore. You kind of got to admire the dexterity of it, right, to construct puns like that. And these type of jokes are really popular and they were treated almost like puzzles rather than jokes. In fact, they were known as conundrum jokes in the 19th century. And so you would often have a pause between the setup and the punchline where people were invited to try and solve them, to kind of solve the riddle. And that doesn't necessarily make for the kind of best rhythm of joke telling, but it can be really satisfying when you figure it out. And I mean, I'm really annoying at Christmas around the dinner table when you get the Christmas cracker jokes, because I'm always trying to do that as a historian of this, trying to get a reverse engineer and guess the punchline before it comes up. And the Victorians really enjoyed doing that. In fact, they had conundrum competitions on really large scales. So there was this magician who would tour the country doing his big sort of shows, and then on his last night in town, instead of doing the usual magic show, he would put on a grand conundrum competition when all the people in the town would be submitting their jokes. They would be read out on stage in, and then judged by a committee of local gentlemen who would then decide on, like the best pun, which would then win a prize. It'd be something like a fine electroplated tea service or something like that. So they love jokes like that. And so we look at them now and think, oh, blimey, That's a bit weak or a bit torturous. But the Victorians really seem to have got a pleasure out of them. And to be known as someone who could bring a good conundrum to a dinner party, I mean, that's the kind of thing that, you know, that gets you invited to the good parties.

[David Musgrove]

So that sounds a bit like Britain's Got Talent. Like, if you've got a panel of judges looking at things, is it kind of, you know, along those lines?

[Bob Nicholson]

Yeah, I mean, I suppose it is in that kind of, like, talent show idea. And people would, of course, you know, you want to win the prize, but really you want to be the one that has the best joke, the best conundrum. So, yeah, I mean, that was extremely popular and the winners would often then be published in the newspaper, so the local reporters would be in as well. And it'd be like, here are the results of the Great Conundrum Competition for Manchester. When Professor Anderson, that was the magician when he was in town. So, yeah, it was quite a big deal. And the glory of being the best punner or punsmith in your town, I guess, was worth having.

[David Musgrove]

Yeah, this Professor Anderson sounds like a fun guy. Do we know anything about him?

[Bob Nicholson]

I mean, he's one of the great Magicians of the 19th century and far more famous for his magic performances. Historians of magic and people who are kind of connoisseurs of the history of magic will know him because he's very well known. But, yeah, it's fascinating that he would sort of derail all the kind of, the magic side of things to think, right, we were going to do a conundrum competition, but it seems to have worked because he got so much press for it. It would always be reported in the papers. It was kind of one of his hallmarks. And every town seems to have really embraced that final performance when they could all tell their best jokes.

[David Musgrove]

Right. So he'd be like, sawing a woman in half and then suddenly stop and start doing conundrums. Or were they separate the magic and the puns, do you think?

[Bob Nicholson]

Yeah, I guess so, yeah. I believe separate from what I can gather, you find descriptions of his shows and all the typical magic tricks. From what I could gather, the descriptions of the knight with the conundrums, it seemed as if, like, that took center stage and the magic was put to one side for a bit because, you know, logistics. Realistically, they might have, like, 50, 60, maybe 100 jokes been read out and judged. So it was quite a big occasion.

[David Musgrove]

That sounds good. Fun. Sounds like a good night out. Now, look, the Victorians are sort of famously prudish, or at least we imagine them to be prudish. Did they find bodily functions amusing?

[Bob Nicholson]

So this is a really tricky one, right? So I'm certain the answer is yes, in the same way that I think throughout human history, you know, farts have been funny or people have found them funnier or all those kind of things. What changes in the 19th century is that those kind of jokes are no longer considered respectable in the way that you would put them in, let's say, a respectable newspaper, or tell them on stage in a respectable theatre. And there's a really sort of interesting way we can look at this transition. So you look back to the 18th century and you look at the great satirists, you know, like Hogarth, Gillray, all these guys, they're incredibly open about bodily functions. You will have satirical cartoons where the king is literally defecating boats onto France and that look like Pooh. And they're very open about it. There will be caricatures of sex where you see literally everything. It would be hardcore, as we would put it now, you wouldn't get that in the 19th century. And we can sort of track this change through a particularly famous joke book. It's called Joe Miller's Jests. It's perhaps the most famous joke book in history, and it's originally published in the early 18th century. And it's famous, I suppose, because for generations afterwards, people would sort of talk about it as if it was like the origin text of all humour, the primordial ooze from which the kind of all other jokes evolved and emerged. Now, of course, jokes predate that, but nevertheless, this book is this kind of monumental expression of the state of British humour, and it gets reprinted over and over and over again. But instead of treating it like a sacred text which should never be tinkered with, successive generations go in and edit it and they remove stuff and they add things. And so there is a version of this published in the Victorian period, well over 100 years after the original version, where they say in the intro that all jokes have been removed, which might be considered, you know, distasteful for the family fireside. And so what I did, I went back and I looked at the original joke book and I looked at the Victorian one, and I found all of the jokes that they decided to cut, and there are about, you know, 50 or 60 that they were basically too rude for the Victorians, and they are almost all, in some way about bodily Functions. So I've got a couple of them here and I should say these are 18th century jokes and they are incredibly wordy and have no sense of rhythm to them. So, like, you probably won't even realize when the punchline has happened in these. So bear with me. Okay, if you think Victorian jokes are hard to make funny, this is like, this is hard mud.

[David Musgrove]

So get ready for the bad Georgian joke.

[Bob Nicholson]

Okay, here we go. A country farmer going across his grounds in the dusk of the evening spied a young fellow and a lass very busy near a five bar gate in one of his fields and calling out to them to know what they were about. The said young man said, no harm, farmer, we are only going to propagate. In other words, you know, they were having sex. Not great.

[David Musgrove]

I think you're being a bit negative. I think that's quite good.

[Bob Nicholson]

Do you think I'm too, like. I'm too allied to the Victorians and I'm like, oh, that's terrible. Georgians.

[David Musgrove]

It took me a little while to.

[Bob Nicholson]

Get it, but okay, let me. There's a few sort of. Here's one I quite like. It's so tempting to kind of edit these to try and make them sort of make more sense to modern readers, but I will read it in its original 18th century here. So we get it unaltered, as it was a gentlewoman growing big with child who had two lovers, one of them with a wooden leg. The question was put, which of the two would be the father of the child. He with the wooden leg offered to decide it in this. If the child said he comes into the world with a wooden leg, I will be the father of it. If not, it must be yours. No, we're getting. I'm going to do the even worse thing now, which is trying to explain a joke and why it's funny. Right, but so, I mean, the comic situation here is that two men have been, you know, lovers of the same woman. They're trying to figure out who's the father of her child. And the guy with a wooden leg basically says, the baby comes out with a wooden leg. I'll accept that it's my child. If not, it must be yours. So it's his way of kind of getting out of being a father. Right. And the kind of comic absurdity of imagining a baby being born with a wooden leg I kind of find enjoyable. So that one I quite like. But as I say, my sense of humour has been. It's been warped by a lot of these. I'll do one More. And this is a kind of good example of something that would definitely be considered too rude and crude for the Victorians. So there's a gentleman happening. It says in the joke, to turn up against a house to make water. In other words, to have a piss against a wall. Did not see two young ladies looking out of a window close by him until he heard them giggling. Then looking towards them, he asked what made them so merry. Oh, Lord, sir, said one of the ladies, a very little thing will make us laugh. The implication here, of course, is it's his penis. Those are examples there. So we've got a joke about people having sex against a gate in a field. We've got a joke about a woman having two lovers and the kind of infidelity associated with that. And then we've got a joke about women, basically a dick joke, women laughing at the size of a man's member. That is a good example of the kind of stuff the Victorians cut out. They also cut out jokes about bad breath or jokes about the church. So anything sexual they kind of considered unacceptable, or anything too rude and crude. Now, I think it's important to say that we're talking here about one way in which Victorian humour has been recorded, which are joke books that had to be printed and sold, respectively. I'm convinced they were still telling incredibly crude jokes about bodily humour in private, but those things don't necessarily get captured in print. I can give you a few examples of actual crude Victorian jokes. So there's one. When the editors and contributors to Punch magazine, one of the most famous satirical magazines of the time, famous for its wit and its highbrow humour, they were having their weekly dinner and sort of chatting about the politics of the week, what the cartoon was going to be, when Thackeray, one of the great writers of the time, basically just starts cracking jokes about a medical condition he had, which was a urethral stricture, in other words, a thing that made it incredibly hard for him to pee. And supposedly all the other kind of people around the dinner table are absolutely in hysterics about this. But that joke would never be in Punch. They're never gonna tell a joke about how hard it is to have a wee when you're getting older in a respectful magazine, they're gonna tell jokes about Gladstone and Disraeli and all the kind of great politicians. That kind of thing wouldn't make it into print. So we only get little glimpses of the ruder side of the Victorians. I mean, I was sort of debating whether I should tell you this, there are some incredibly rude Victorian limericks that I have that are like absolute top shelf. I think, possibly too rude for the podcast, but we can do it if you want and you can make a decision.

[David Musgrove]

I want to hear them. Let's see.

[Bob Nicholson]

Okay, so bit of context. These come from a Victorian magazine called the Pearl, which was a pornographic magazine circulated in private among gentlemen. As I say, top shelf swears in this. But there was a young lady of Hitchin who was scratching her C s in the kitchen. Her father said, rose, it's the crabs. I suppose you're right, PA the BS are itching. So, I mean, yeah, pretty top shelf. And there's one that's perhaps slightly less kinda sweary that we might be able to get away with. There was a young man of Peru who had nothing whatever to do, so he took out a carrot and buggered his parrot and sent the results to the zoo. So pretty full on. I mean. And the reason I always want to share these is that they seem so un. Victorian. The idea of them using that kind of language, joking about those kind of things, about basically lice, STDs, about bestiality, it all seems so unfamiliar to us, how we imagine the Victorians to be. So those jokes were circulating, they were there, and they've survived in these tiny fragments, but they are not the kind of stuff you would hear in a mainstream musical or read in a magazine or newspaper. And so we have this image of the Victorians as being much more respectable, of not being interested in bodily humour, in part because they edited that stuff for public consumption.

[David Musgrove]

So I'm just thinking regular listeners to podcast will know that I'm a Bayer tapestry enthusiast and I'm thinking about the replica of the Bayer tapestry that was made in the 1880s by the Victorian Ladies of Leek and Embroidery society. And they famously removed the rude bits from the tapestry. The tapestry has lots of penises in it and they put little shorts on the figures. Well, actually they didn't. It was some chaps who were working off a photographic replica of it. It wasn't the ladies who did it, it was some men at the museum who did it beforehand. But that's quite interesting, isn't it, that sense that they're kind of like they are self editing there.

[Bob Nicholson]

Yeah. And editing historical documents, I suppose. You know, the joke book is the same kind of thing where they're shaping it for modern tastes, but in the same way that we do it now, don't we? Think of all the sitcoms in recent years that have been edited to have some jokes REM or to have disclaimers put in front of them to say, you know, Disney no longer endorses this particular caricature from the 1940s or 1950s. So I think we're often guilty perhaps of editing comedy to suit whatever our tastes might be. But I think that the biotapestry example is great, right, because you're right, that's a great example of the Victorians trying to edit something so that it's more respectable for public consumption. But this is also a time period when pornography is widely available. So it's not as if all of them are prudes or all of them are incredibly anxious and respectable. In fact, that reaction has always got to be reacting against something, right? They have to be trying to censor these things because they're out there. People are wanting to tell those kind of jokes, produce those kind of pictures. And so I think the image we have of the Victorians, I think, is perhaps too often shaped by relatively respectable middle class voices who have the cultural power to shape what appears in respectable publications and what we keep, what we throw away.

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[David Musgrove]

So just talking about the sort of sources available to you as a historian of popular culture. So you've described these joke books and the magazines and newspapers where these things are recorded and how you have to kind of navigate them to try and get to the reality of what people were joking about on the ground. Are there any other sources available to you to try and understand the sense of humour?

[Bob Nicholson]

Yeah, it's a real challenge because comedy is such an ephemeral thing. So many of the things we laugh at are situational. They just occur in conversation between friends. They're kind of reacting to moments, you know, they're not necessarily systematically recorded jokes like the ones that we've been talking about so far. So it is. It's really difficult for any time period for the Victorians. We have a few sources we can go to. So we can find examples of jokes in newspapers. In fact, that is the main source of them. They were produced on an almost industrial scale for newspapers and magazines. Magazines. Millions upon millions of jokes have survived there. Beyond that, we can pick up little bits and pieces in diaries, we can get in sort of memoirs in letters. You can occasionally find little sort of passing references, but there is no systematic single source for it. So you're often kind of scrabbling around just looking for stuff. Or very occasionally I'll happen upon something while I'm looking at something completely different and I'll just find this little moment where somebody recalls laughing at something. I think, ah, yeah, there's that little gem that I can keep to one side, but it's a really challenging thing for historians and it's particularly challenging to recover comedy for certain groups. So we know a lot about what made middle class white men in London laugh, because they were the ones that ran the magazines. We know comparatively less about what would have made working class Victorians laugh, what would have made women laugh. And so there is some evidence, but it's a thing that I've been working on for quite a few years now and I'm still kind of piecing together scraps. So it's a challenge. Which is not to say that the Victorians didn't laugh or didn't have a sense of humor. They definitely did. It's just one of those things that's just. It's never systematically recorded. We think of jokes and comedy as disposable, as ephemeral, as throwaway stuff, when actually it's really culturally important. We just haven't always kept it. You sometimes find things scrabbled in the margins of other texts. It can really be that kind of tricky.

[David Musgrove]

I presume there's no recordings of anything happening, you know, any live recordings or anything that still exists.

[Bob Nicholson]

Yeah. So for the musical, which is one of the kind of main venues of comedy at this time, right towards the end of the 19th century, when you first start to get those first phonographs, you know, Edison's phonographs, the first thing to properly record sound, you do get some examples of musical performers often once towards the end of their career, where bits of their act have been captured. Particularly as we get into the 20th century, there are some examples of kind of early experimental recordings where you do hear people laughing. Oh, I think there was one I heard years ago of the poet Robert Browning, who's clearly a bit drunk at a dinner party where they've got a phonograph out and he's been asked to kind recite one of his poems and he's forgetting all the words and you can hear him kind of absolutely roaring with laughter at himself, sort of messing this up. And so that's a beautifully human moment where we get that, but, oh, those things are incredibly rare. So, as I said, little glimpses. So you can hear a Victorian laugh, but not many occasions.

[David Musgrove]

And was there any sort of equivalent to stand up comedians that we have today? You've talked about kind of the Music hall, you've talked about Professor Anderson and his conundrums, but were there people who kind of professionally stood up on stage and tried to make people laugh?

[Bob Nicholson]

Yeah, for sure. I guess if we're looking for the Origins of Stand up, which I guess I would see as a combination of storytelling and joke telling in kind of spoken word form. Right. That's how Stand up typically is. Now, I say you can find it in two forms in the 19th century. So one absolutely is the musical, which is the kind of main vehicle for kind of live entertainment, particularly by the late 19th century. Typically, then your musical comedians would be there to sing comic songs, but in between those, they would have patter, you know, engaging with the audience, prepared jokes. And some of them would emphasise the patter a bit more than others. So there was a particularly famous American comedian named R.G. knowles who came over and took London by storm in the final decades of the 19th century. And he was known for his incredibly kind of fast talking American delivery. And he would have comic songs, and those are the bits that have largely survived. You can listen to his records, but the reviews of the time emphasise how funny his pattern between the songs was. So that's one form of sort of Stand up, but where the song, I suppose, is the main excuse for being there, but the other comedies kind of you sneak it in. The other, the one that I think is less well known is the comic lecture, which doesn't sound very sort of promising, but it's actually a real sort of source of comedy from the period where people would come and deliver a lecture on a particular topic. But actually it would be an excuse for absolutely littering it all with jokes. So there is an example I really like a guy named Artemus Ward, actually another American comedian who came to England and made it big. Before Mark Twain, he was seen as like one of the big promising figures of American humour until he died really young, actually, while he was in England of tuberculosis, I think. But while he was here, while he was still alive, he did a show in London at a place called the Egyptian hall, beloved of magicians and other performers. And it was a lecture on the Mormons and his kind of experiences visiting them. And there is kind of actual travelogue content in it, but it is also absolutely filled with jokes. You know, he would have a magic lantern slide, so I guess almost the equivalent of a comedian with a PowerPoint presentation. And the great thing is that the script of that has survived with all of his kind of stage directions. And it was published, you could buy the written out version of it. And yeah, it's absolutely filled with jokes and sort of using his experiences among the Mormons as a setup for these kind of comic moments. So I would say, if any way, anything that is closer to stand up, perhaps even than the musical performers coming out and doing a turn for a few minutes. But both really are examples of people paying to go and see a comedian and paying to laugh as their main motivation. So, yeah, I would say you could trace the roots of stand up in those ways.

[David Musgrove]

I'm reminded actually of the last time we chatted, which was when I was researching the life of this famous, well, semi famous wheelbarrow pedestrian, Bob Carlisle, who pushed his wheelbarrow from Land's End to John o'. Groats. And he used to stop on the way and deliver a talk to the local town hall, or even just stood on the steps of the town hall, I think. And I think he did try to drop in some jokes, but I'm not sure he was. Not sure he was that droll, actually. But he was like touring essentially, you know, whilst pushing a wheelbarrow. So that's maybe part of the scene.

[Bob Nicholson]

I think there's a lot of that going on. Like public speaking and public performances were a major part of Victorian entertainment. You could get guides, handbooks for how to be an engaging public speaker or material for you to recite in public. So that was a really important part of their entertainment culture. We shouldn't be surprised that people want to laugh in those contexts and that having a joke and being able to sort of command an audience in that way and make them engaged, it's actually a great way to get them to listen to everything else you're gonna say. So I've got examples as well of politicians dropping jokes into their speeches as well. So joke telling was everywhere. It isn't just contained into these sort of small areas that we might think of as comedy. You see it in all sorts of places.

[David Musgrove]

Yeah, yeah. Okay, listeners, if you wanna listen to Bob Carlisle, check out the Timer Tamer who went to see on the podcast feed. And you can listen to Bob telling us all sorts of interesting things about Anglo American relations as well, which we might come back to in a second. But I'm just wondering. Move on. You've kind of alluded to this in some of your previous answers, but I'm wondering about humour through the social scales. How different was it and how far can we see that from what you've been saying? It sounds like there is quite a lot that's kind of hidden from what we can see because we get the sort of the metropolitan elite's focus on jokes.

[Bob Nicholson]

Yeah, there's certainly a kind of overbalance in terms of the surviving historical record of middle class male Voices and Punch magazine would be a classic example of this. It's perhaps the text that people are most familiar with, if they've seen any Victorian comedy. Might have been a Punch cartoon in a history lesson at school as a way of understanding the politics of the time. If you look at Punch, a lot of their comedy punches down to sort of use a modern term. Right. So there'll be lots of jokes in there about working class servants sort of misspeaking Cockneys with kind of peculiar accents and peculiar beliefs. So there is a lot of class based humour at the time for sure, in more popular papers. I'm thinking here of a magazine like Titbits, which is one of my favourite Victorian magazines, sold for a penny, filled with all sorts of curious things, but had jokes on its front page every week that had a broad audience, not just the working classes, but was certainly aimed at a working class audience. There are quite a lot of jokes in there at the expense of toffs and kind of, you know, rich men, their ridiculous outfits and their peculiar manners. So you definitely get that sort of joking around social class and social difference in the same way that you get quite a lot of gender based jokes. So there are a lot of jokes in Punch, which largely a male dominated paper about women's fashions and things like that. But I've also found quite a few jokes where men are the butt of the joke as well. So you can find evidence of all of this happening. It is harder, for instance, to find examples of what might a bunch of working class mates have joked about down the pub. We don't necessarily have that recorded, whereas for the members of the Punches writing team, we have a diarist who was recording everything they said at their dinner parties. Because it seems so momentous and important that these great wits must have their gags immortalised. So that's the challenge we've got. And it's something that historians are working on gradually reconstructing these different other comic cultures. But it's tough, they just don't have the same kind of voice in the historical record.

[David Musgrove]

Yeah, but right at the top of the social scale, of course, was Queen Victoria. And she was famously not a muse, wasn't she? That's the thing we understand about her. Is that true? What made her laugh?

[Bob Nicholson]

Okay, so we should start with that famous quote, right? Because it's perhaps the phrase that is most closely associated with her. If you were to ask anybody, what did Queen Victoria say? In fact, that's probably the only thing they would be able to mention, which is Extraordinary, given how long she was in power. And so the story goes with that, that supposedly she was at a dinner party and she heard that one of her servants, her equerries, did a really good impression of her and she asks him to do it in front of her. So already, I mean, this poor guy is absolutely in a bad spot, tough gig. He tries to do it, but doesn't put his heart into it. And she supposedly says, we are not amused. Now, this is in late 1880s. She's been on the throne for best part of 50 years at this point. So it is, you know, a more mature Victoria now, she later is supposed to have said. She never said it, so it may never even have happened. But it took on a life of its own as a way to kind of capture this idea that Victoria, and by extension the Victorians, were kind of incredibly repressed and serious and incapable of a laugh. Now, you ask me, like, what did Victoria laugh at? And the answer is loads of stuff. If you read her diaries and you can search them online in the UK for free, and you just put in words like laugh, you know, funny, or any kind of words you might think she might have used to capture when something funny happened to her. And it's all the time she's talking about funny things said at a dinner table. So you can start to sort of reconstruct a little bit about what made her laugh. So from what I can gather, she definitely likes physical comedy. So, I mean, literally, somebody falling over, or a man sitting on his hat, or somebody trapping their door, her fingers in a door. You know, the old classics, she absolutely seems to enjoy those. But a lot of the things she records in her diary are kind of funny or accidentally funny things said at dinner parties. So there is. There is one anecdote that often comes up in her biographies of Victoria that I rather like. So she's at a dinner party and she's been sat next to this retired old admiral who's going a little bit deaf, just keeps boring her talking and talking about this ship that had sank, that had been kind of dredged up from the ground and that they were going to, you know, repair. Victoria's kind of desperate to get him off of this really boring story, so asks him, you know, how is your sister doing? Because he's deaf, he doesn't properly hear her and says, well, ma', am, I'm going to have her turned over, take a good look at her bottom and scrape all the barnacles off. She supposedly, in that moment, is absolutely in hysterics kind of shoulders shaking, weeping with laughter. You know, embarrassing moment for this admiral. But, I mean, you know, if that happened to me, I would laugh my head off at that, if somebody made that kind of mistake now. Right. I think it's a nice moment. And there are so many like that of Victoria supposedly, you know, being absolutely in hysterics and sort of practically crying with laughter. So this image we have of her is incredibly serious. It just doesn't resemble the version of her that you see in private when you read her diaries, when you read the memoirs of people who went to see her and got to know her well. I mean, she could definitely be stern. She definitely had her moments. And there was, of course, a long period after the death of Albert where her public Persona was one of kind of grief and mourning that perhaps contributed to this idea of her being a bit dour. But in public, of course, she has to project the power, the authority, the dignity of a sovereign. She can't be going around cracking jokes, you know, in front of people outside of Buckingham palace, you know, she had to project a certain image there. But in private, she's a person and she. Yeah, she liked to laugh.

[David Musgrove]

And you're working on a book about the assassination attempts on Victoria, and people were fairly regularly trying to kill her, weren't they? So that must have sort of made her, you know, reflect on humour a bit.

[Bob Nicholson]

Indeed, yeah. It's true. That's a slightly odd nature of my research, from sort of comedy to assassins at the moment. But she would joke in the wake of those occasionally, as maybe putting on a bit of bravado in private. But, yeah, she definitely had a sense of humour and enjoyed a laugh.

[David Musgrove]

Okay, just sort of wanted to use a bit of modern vernacular terms here. Is there anything that could get you cancelled in Victorian culture if you told a joke that was in really poor form? I mean, we talked about some of the subjects that were maybe off limits, but did that ever happen? Did people get booed off stage, that sort of thing?

[Bob Nicholson]

Yeah, I think. I mean, those are very much the kind of things. So the kind of jokes we talked about before, the jokes around bodily functions, I guess, kind of scurrilous gossip about respectable people. I mean, yeah, those are very much the kind of jokes you weren't supposed to tell in public. I don't have any specific examples of somebody trying one of those out and suddenly being kind of publicly shamed. But I suppose that's partly because that culture of respectability was so effective at policing that behaviour that actually People kind of knew what would be considered acceptable, what would be considered, you know, beyond the pale. And I'm sure there were examples of people who had a few too many glasses of wine and said something that they shouldn't have said in the presence, ladies. In fact, I think some of the examples of Queen Victoria being a little bit stern around comedy actually come from her kind of stressing that these kind of jokes probably shouldn't be told in this kind of company. So you do get plenty of examples of that policing going on. I mean, the closest examples to cancellation would be music hall stars who were constantly trying to just go right up to the line with innuendo and figure out, you know, what would be acceptable before the censors or the Society for the Suppression of Vice, which are all these kinds of. Of organisations trying to police public morals, would swoop in and try and cancel them, or indeed strike out particular songs from their act so that they couldn't perform them. So that tends to be the battleground. Where the Victorian version of cancellation was playing out was the music halls, because there was a real worry there that it might be kind of damaging to public morals and public manners if certain topics were allowed to be spoke of openly. So, yeah, they would use all sorts of clever wordplay and a nudge and a wink to avoid saying too much.

[David Musgrove]

Okay. And another common term that we have today is things going viral. You mentioned earlier that when we were chatting before the interview that sometimes this happened, jokes going viral, and particularly crossing the Atlantic.

[Bob Nicholson]

Yeah. So this is one of the things that first got me into studying comedy, because I was so surprised that this was happening. So, yeah, comedy circulates on a global scale in the 19th century. So you would have, say, let's say a joke that might be written in New York might then be kind of passed around different newspapers in the United States. And the way that would work, it's literally cut and paste. Editors would be looking through other newspapers, looking for any interesting articles, tidbits, snippets that would be interesting. They cut it out, they paste it into their own newspaper, and so things go on. And occasionally things would be edited in the process. But, yeah, there are examples of jokes that would start in America and then be imported into Britain, in fact, on a massive scale. So some of the most popular newspapers in the Victorian period would have a weekly column of American humour, maybe 10, 12 jokes imported from the States. So, I mean, I should probably tell you one, right, so we can get an example of an American joke. So a woman from Chicago Goes to see a lawyer and asks him, how much do you charge for a divorce? He looks at her and says, $100, ma', am, but for you, I'll do five for 300. In an American context, the joke here was that Chicago had particularly lax divorce laws, so a woman from Chicago might divorce and remarry at the drop of a hat. But to a British audience, it really is just a joke about Americans and their kind of strange customs. So the kind of regional differences that would have been detectable by a reader in Boston, in New York and San Francisco, I think, largely evaporate as that moves across the Atlantic. And it just becomes a thing of like what those crazy Americans are up to over there. But there are loads of these. One of the ones I tracked that really did go viral, went all over the world, was a joke about an undertaker, supposedly in a Wild west mining town where there had been lots of bouts of pneumonia, had supposedly put a sign outside of his office reading, you kick the bucket, we do the rest. And this was sort of seen as in a particularly American example of kind of slightly over the top advertising, not very respectable. And it's a play on what was then a famous advertising slogan of Kodak cameras. You press the button, we do the rest. Anyway, that joke travels all around America, gets sort of edited, reworked, then comes into Britain, goes viral around Britain. I found it in dozens and dozens of newspapers. And then you start to see politicians using it. It. So there'll be suddenly a conservative politician up in mould in North Wales giving a speech and saying something like, as the American undertaker put outside of his office, this is what I would say to Mr. Gladstone's government, you know, you kick the bucket, we'll do the rest. And it kind of taken on a whole life of its own. And it's through that continual process of scissors and paste, of cutting, reprinting, cutting, reprinting. And I do think it is kind of equivalent to going viral now in the way that we would, you know, retweet, reshare, repost online. We see a thing we like, that we find funny. We think, oh, yeah, we'll share that with another audience. And bit by bit, sometimes it gets edited, tweaked, repurposed, but it moves. And that was absolutely happening on a massive scale. In the 19th century, those American jokes were incredibly popular with British audiences. In fact, I've seen, like, reviewers at the time or commentators at the time saying that American humour was considered more witty, more like black humour, whereas British humour was a bit more kind of Laboured and slapstick at this point. So the idea that American humour being more highbrow, more refreshing, I think perhaps the tables have turned slightly since then and typically now British humour is seen as being drier and America humour more broad. But in the 19th century it was the other way around and British audiences absolutely ate it up. This was being sold in the most popular papers in the country, the ones that are most in tune with what readers wanted. They gave them American comedy sometimes, actually, they got rid of their British joke column and just said, right, we'll print the American ones.

[David Musgrove]

Wow. Now, that does tell us something about the differences between the British and the American attitudes then, doesn't it, Ben? That's a topic which you've studied a lot, isn't it? Like the Anglo American differences tell us a little bit more about that.

[Bob Nicholson]

Sure. So, I mean, I think when people imagine the moment that maybe Britain fell in love with American culture, we always imagine it's the cinema, right? This shows this glamorous new world after the First World War, world of modernity, skyscrapers, technology, while we're all kind of recovering from disaster in Europe. But actually, what a lot of my research shows is that people in Britain start to become fascinated with America and its culture way earlier and in fact, I mean, right at the start of the 19th century, but certainly by the kind of middle of the 19th century onwards, and that's because so much American culture was being brought into Britain. You know, the most popular writers in America were largely humorists, guys like Mark Twain, Artemis Ward, who I mentioned earlier, they were household names in Britain. You start to get American slang terms becoming incredibly popular in Britain. American cocktails served at bars, in music calls. So, yeah, there is a lot more cultural exchange going on than perhaps we might realise. Half a century before Hollywood, people were starting to laugh at American jokes, drink American cocktails, buy American products. It predates our kind of sense of understanding of that dynamic by long way, particularly a time. We imagine the 19th century as a time when Britain rules the roost and the Victorians are kind of very culturally confident and on top and exporting Britishness around the world, often against people's will. But actually, they were really receptive to America. It was seen as a kind of land of the new and of the exciting and of the novel and of the surprising. And they were always curious as to see what it was going to produce. And comedy, I would argue this is my kind of controversial take. American historians might disagree with me. I think comedy is America's first major export. Certainly its first major cultural export. As I say, way before cinema, way before music, humor was the thing that led the way.

[David Musgrove]

I'm thinking of Buffalo Bill and his Wild west show. I mean that we lapped it up here in Britain, didn't we?

[Bob Nicholson]

Yeah. Oh, yeah. We could do a whole other podcast on the cowboy craze in the Victoria in Britain, because it wasn't just Buffalo Bill. There were loads of these guys touring Britain at the time with their Wild west shows. But Buffalo Bill, certainly Victoria went to see him and absolutely loved it. I mean, he was possibly the most famous person in the world, you know, in the 1880s, his face on every poster. But yeah, I mean, you would say in terms of American celebrities, you would maybe say Mark Twain, Buffalo Bill, Thomas Edison, maybe Abraham Lincoln. In the world of politics, all of those figures would have been incredibly famous, well known in Victorian Britain.

[David Musgrove]

Okay, you've talked about the sort of, the differences between Victorian humour and Georgian humour. What about the differences between Victorian humour and our modern humour? And I'm specifically wondering, obviously the Victorian period ends, then we get the Edwardian period and then we're straight into global conflict, which clearly must have upset people and sort of changed the way we saw the world. Did it change the way we saw humour, do you think?

[Bob Nicholson]

I think, honestly, not initially. So we often imagine the Victorian period and what comes later, that there's a massive break in which the First World War is this understandably a cataclysmic event that changes so much. But culturally I don't think it changes quite as quickly as people might imagine. So I've got in my collection of weird old magazines and joke books, lots of stuff from the 20s, 30s, 40s, and I think if I did a kind of blind taste test on this, if you, if you just took a joke from one of those and one from the 1880s, I don't think I would always be able to tell a difference. And that they're still talking about a lot of the same recurring subjects. They're jokes about mother in laws, they're jokes about lawyers trying to con you, they're jokes about botched romantic advances. So a lot of that stuff that we find funny endures for a very, very long time. I mean, I give you. Sometimes it just changes slightly. So I'll give you an example. I mean, if we went right up to the 1970s and we told a joke about a milkman, we would expect that the classic joke would be the monkman is sleeping with all of the housewives on his route, delivering the milk. That was the kind of. Of recurring comic trope. You see it in Carry on films, all sorts of things. If you told a milkman joke in the 1870s, he would still be a sneaky figure you don't trust, but it would be because he was watering down your milk and putting chalk in it to make it look like it was not watered down. So there are two versions of a milkman joke. The one being he's kind of a sneaky person trying to con you. The other is he's trying to sleep with your wife. At some point, they kind of transition. But that figure, the idea of a milkman joke is there 100 years apart, and there are loads of other examples of that. Having said that, as time goes on, that kind of Victorian respectability definitely begins to fade. And it's a really nice set of Punch cartoons where they notice this difference. So one of Punch's most famous jokes from the 19th century, again, hard to describe this because it's a cartoon, but it's a cartoon where a young vicar, a young curate is gone, sort of visit the kind of local priest who's his boss, and they're having breakfast and the young vicar is trying to be very polite and his boss says, oh, I see, you know you've got a bad egg on your plate. And the curate says, oh, no, don't worry, you know, parts of it are excellent. And this is the origin of the phrase a curate's egg, if you're ever so familiar with that, meaning something that is excellent in parts, but bad in other words. Anyway, classic Victorian joke about kind of being mild mannered. There is a Punch cartoon from, I think, the 1990s which kind of recreates this scene, but instead of all this politeness, the curate just says, quote, but this egg is f ing bad. And the idea had been that manners have completely gone and that while Punch had endured, something had changed in the kind of jokes we were willing to tell. So, yeah, humour does change, as it continues to change now. But for me, when I look at Victorian comedy, when you get past the language barrier, when you get past the kind of different rhythms of their jokes, what you actually find are that the things we laugh at in many cases are the same and they endure.

[David Musgrove]

Brilliant. Have you got maybe a joke to finish up? Any particularly witty ones that could keep us laughing?

[Bob Nicholson]

This is one of my favourites, so for context, one of the sort of things that we no longer tell jokes about, but the Victorians love telling jokes about, were poets. And how kind of. What a waste of space they Were, story goes. So a man was out visiting the countryside and goes into a local pub, begins to order some food, when in the corner, he spots this long haired fellow with a pen and a piece of paper. And the people around him are just giving him loads and loads of food and drink and he's absolutely eating like a king. So the visitor, you know, says to the landlord, hey, you know, who's that guy over there? What's going on? Landlord says, you know, that's our poet. We give him food and drink, whatever he needs. Visitor says, blimey, that's amazing. I can't believe this is happening out here in a rural village. Where has his work been published? To which the landlord says, oh, hasn't been published, sir. Won't be published till after he dies. We're keeping him alive as long as we can, which I quite enjoy that. I think that's decent. I think as a Victorian poetry joke, that's not bad. I'll take not bad. I think that's, as his reactions go, a sort of general and sort of a smile and a not bad is enough for me.

[David Musgrove]

Brilliant. Well, Bob, it's been fascinating. Thank you so much for enlightening us and entertaining us a little bit about.

[Bob Nicholson]

My pleasure.

[Podcast Host / Narrator]

That was Bob Nicholson speaking today. David Musgrove. Bob is lecturer in 19th century history at Edge Hill University. And if you want to hear more about that story of the Victorian wheelbarrow entertainer, search for the series the Tiger Tamer who Went to Sea, available now in the History Extra Archive.