ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that the thematic complexes of body and society, or the physical body and the social body, have featured repeatedly as fundamental points of reference. For a society which attached shame to nakedness in many it not most social situations, albeit with certain temporal (Shrovetide) and local (bathhouse) exceptions, the comic effect of involuntary nakedness was widely recognized and established in various literary traditions, including of course comic tales. In comic tales this view of the repulsive and contemptible nature of old bodies is unmitigated, regardless of whether it occurs in a more 'charitable' context or not. It seems likely that comic tales concerning bodily deficiencies offered an escape from the anxieties of everyday life and the audience's own experiences of physical frailty and mortality. The chapter shows that the more drastic the violence narrated, the more acute the pleasure on offer, and the more effective these texts were in strengthening an audience's sense of collective identity.
