ABSTRACT
The butts of Erasmus's laughter are his brothers and sisters, his fellow Christians. He sets out to show them to be fools. He must tread with care; any Christian raising laughter would do well to linger over a warning from Jesus. For Erasmus, pedantry so opaque would be meaningless to the 'foolish' fishermen whom Jesus chose to follow him. Erasmus is an adept at doing that quite briefly. The technical jargon of the Schoolmen was an unquenchable source of humanist laughter. Simply to cite it produced smirks or guffaws. Even papal approval could not stop the censors of the Sorbonne from criticizing and censoring the scriptural works of Erasmus. Erasmus was a scoffer, and censors the world over have a nose for laughter.
