ABSTRACT
The overall tone of the speech is satiric. It is funny because people are implicitly invited to contrast Jeppe with conventionally accepted ideals of manhood, and of course he fails on every score. During the course of the action, Jeppe becomes the plaything of a local aristocrat, the Baron, who finds him, in a drunken stupor, lying on top of a dungheap. There is nothing particularly surprising about finding such deeply conservative views expressed in comedy. The neoclassical style of comedy that Molière had perfected was ideally suited to express this kind of world-view. The eighteenth century saw a gradual return to a militantly Christian view of comedy, a view of comedy that acknowledged no essential distinction between high and low styles. In the main, this development was sustained by writers from Europe’s professional and merchant classes who presented in their plays liberal Christian sentiments that were fundamentally opposed to the assumptions of Renaissance absolutism.
