Anytime I mentioned this class to friends or family this semester, I was always met by confusion (“Body bodies?”), many questions (“why would you take a class like that?”), and even groans at the pun of the name; I think this all sums up the content of the class pretty well. The bawdy has never been an interest of mine, and I definitely felt uncomfortable at points in the class, but honestly not as much as I expected. I was surprisingly pleased with some of the hard questions this class posed about different types of perception, society, class structure, language, and religion! I will take all of these realizations and ways of seeing the world into the rest of my life and academic work, especially into other classical readings (Latin and German major = a lot of grotesque stories!)
There are a lot of our readings which will stick with me forever; besides the fact that I can’t stop seeing the bawdy all around me, a lot of the images are too bizarre, I think, to forget (especially the Fellini.) They made me laugh a lot—more than I thought they would. I liked the clever parts the best (any of the wordplay, even if it was a little grotesque, was delightful) or interesting linguistic parts, like the guy who spoke a ton of languages in Rabelais. I was less pleased by the number of words I looked up which forced me to quickly close the tab (especially in Rabelais, but others too) but the class was still worth it.
It definitely opened my eyes to a specific kind of humor which I encountered every day and yet had no idea existed. I appreciated—and yet somehow especially rue—appetizers which pointed out this commonplace grotesque and carnivalesque humor that permeates our culture; conversations about Shrek, Rocky Horror, and Lizzo were academic topics, and I can’t escape seeing other ones now!
Thank you Professor Farmer and all my classmates for making this such a fun semester in spite of everything uncarnivalesque going on around us!
