William Hicks, Coffee-house jests. By the author of the Oxford-jests (London, printed for Benj. Thrale at the Bible in the Poultrey near Cheapside, 1677), [2], 238pp.; 12°. BL: 12314.df.40. ESTCR11013. Extract, pp. i, 1–9. Hünersdorff

A miscellany of 396 numbered prose comic anecdotes and jests, in a 238-page duodecimo jest book (price one shilling). The jest book was an established publishing concept, having emerged in the Tudor period as collections of bon-mots, anecdotes and classical wit (see Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: popular fiction and its readership in seventeenth-century england (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981)). The jest book addresses a popular audience, but it is capable of making scholarly jokes and learned puns. Nonetheless, the bulk of these jests turn on vulgar and low topics, often with a pronounced satirical edge attacking folly and pretension. The significant number of jests that ridicule the events and attitudes of the Interregnum confirm the book’s allegiance to the politics of the court. The miscellany’s relationship to the coffee-house is at best tenuous: it could be read as a kind of evidence of the forms of humour prevalent in coffee-house conversations. More likely, however, the coffee-house is a trope locating the comic commodity within the dominant culture of fashionable urban sociability.