Humour and Hypocrisy
Chaucer’s Subtle Satire of the Church
– Navya Mody
If there is one thing Geoffrey Chaucer understood with terrifying clarity, it is this: nothing exposes corruption faster than a joke. Mockery is a disinfectant. A good laugh can peel varnish off institutions far more efficiently than a sermon. And in The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer turns this disinfectant directly on the medieval Church, an institution powerful enough to terrify kings, but apparently not powerful enough to keep its friars, pardoners, and prioresses from embarrassing themselves in public.
The brilliance is that Chaucer’s comedy rarely looks like an outright attack. He stages observation: pilgrims swap stories, characters disclose themselves, and the Church appears from within this social theatre. The effect is precise rather than theatrical; humour used as an instrument of social diagnosis. A modern critic would attack the Church directly, but Chaucer just records its actions. He doesn’t shout, accuse, or moralise. Instead, he smiles politely, steps aside, and lets the Church speak for itself.
The Holy Men Who Can’t Help Themselves
Let’s begin with the Churchmen: the Friar, the Summoner, the Pardoner. These are not caricatures pulled from outside the institution but representatives of it. The Friar, a man of “charity” whose idea of welfare and benevolence includes flirting with barmaids and negotiating fees like a seasoned businessman. He is essentially a medieval influencer; well-dressed, well-spoken, suspiciously well-funded for someone who has taken vows of poverty, and moves easily between confession and conviviality.
Then there’s the Summoner, a Church officer whose job is to drag sinners to ecclesiastical court. Chaucer’s mention of his “fyr-reed cherubynnes face” covered in “saucefleem” alongside his fondness for garlic, onions, and strong wine are not merely unkind observations. They are symbolic establishments of medieval satire, where visible blemishes often function as outward signs of inward disorder. Chaucer pairs these features with the Summoner’s professional role, to underscore a structural tension between the authority he represents and the weaknesses he embodies. This man, whose position demands spiritual authority, is visibly decaying. Chaucer almost seems sympathetic: it must be difficult to maintain moral superiority when your own skin is revolting against you.
The Pardoner, of course, is the crown jewel of Chaucer’s priestly circus. He sells salvation like it’s a seasonal discount, flaunts relics that would make even a gullible pilgrim squint, and then proudly announces that he scams people for a living. It’s difficult not to laugh; one almost admires the ease with which the Pardoner discusses his own practices; the candour of his dishonesty almost adapts into a rhetorical strength, revealing how performance can overshadow principle. The Pardoner is so unbothered by his own hypocrisy that he becomes oddly charismatic, like a man caught stealing, who decides to give a TED Talk on “The Art of Efficient Theft”. What makes Chaucer’s satire so devastating is that these figures are not outsiders. They are not villains invading the Church. They are the Church. They are the men meant to guide souls toward salvation, but seem far more committed to maintaining personal and institutional advantage. The humour here is not simply derisive; it is evidentiary. Laughter and proof work together and let the reader perform the mental arithmetic.
The Wife of Bath and the Church’s Favourite Double Standards
Oddly enough, one of Chaucer’s sharpest critiques of ecclesiastical hypocrisy comes not from a churchman, but from the Wife of Bath. The medieval Church claimed jurisdiction over marriage, sexuality, and scriptural interpretation; the Wife of Bath quietly demonstrates how inconsistent that jurisdiction could be in practice. Her prologue becomes a kind of counter-sermon, delivered by someone the Church would prefer not to hear from at all.
The Wife of Bath exposes the contradiction simply by existing. Her confidence, her unapologetic indulgence in desire, her delight in interpreting Scripture to suit her needs—all of this violates Church expectations. And every time she quotes the Bible (sometimes accurately, sometimes not), she mimics the clergy who do the same thing but with far more sinister intent.
Her laughter is therefore strategic. When she remarks that men “preach patience” while expecting obedience, or that clerics extol virginity while benefiting from women’s labour and bodies, she is not merely mocking hypocrisy; she is identifying a structural imbalance. In an age shaped by estate satire, she stands as a figure who bears witness to the gap between ecclesiastical ideals and ecclesiastical behaviour.
Her humour is not disruptive for the sake of disruption; it clarifies the ethical dissonance that more orthodox voices in the text refuse to confront.
Through the Wife of Bath, Chaucer demonstrates that hypocrisy need not always be exposed by those within the institution. Sometimes it is most clearly seen by those
who live under its influence yet outside its power. Her voice, confident and unsanctioned, becomes an instrument of insight. She does not dismantle the authority of the Church, but she reveals how fragile that authority appears when examined by someone who understands both its language and its limits.
Chaucer’s Real Trick: Making Satire Look Like Hospitality
One of the easiest mistakes modern readers make is assuming Chaucer is writing an exposé. He isn’t. He’s writing a pilgrimage, a carnivalesque communal storytelling event. Everyone is welcome: the virtuous Parson, the devout Knight, the questionable Friar, the morally flexible Wife.
Chaucer’s humour springs from the fact that he never isolates the Church for special treatment. His satire works because it blends naturally into the multitude of social and temporal registers. Every pilgrim is flawed. The Church simply happens to be… impressively flawed.
In a world where the Church dictated morality, politics, education, and sometimes the menu, Chaucer’s casual critique is radical. It is easy to forget that during Chaucer’s lifetime, public criticism of the Church was not a literary hobby—it was a political risk. So Chaucer wraps his critique in a comfortable format: a road trip, some storytelling, and a lot of jokes.
It’s satire disguised as hospitality.
Wit as an Instrument, Not a Distraction
Chaucer’s humour is light, but the implications are not. His churchmen lie, manipulate, exploit, and moralise. They weaponise spirituality for profit. They preach against sins they themselves commit. And they rely on the average medieval Christian’s fear of damnation to keep the money flowing.
But Chaucer’s genius lies in the fact that he never argues that the Church is unnecessary. Instead, he argues that the Church is just an institution with very human hands. Painfully, embarrassingly human. It is made up of people who cannot meet their own standards, who contradict themselves, who fail their flock while trying to lead it.
The laughter Chaucer provokes isn’t cruel. It’s clarifying. He invites readers to see the Church not as an untouchable monolith, but as a fallible institution full of fallible people—people who, perhaps, shouldn’t be taken quite as seriously as they take themselves.
Why Chaucer Still Works
It has been centuries since Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, yet his satire remains startlingly relevant. Chaucer’s world is not ours, but the human tendencies he records; ambition, inconsistency, performance, and self-interest remain recognisable.
Wherever institutions grow too powerful, hypocrisy follows. Wherever moral authority is claimed rather than earned, humour becomes a weapon. His satire works because it refuses to be loud. It works because it trusts the reader. And like all good satire, it survives because the behaviour it exposes never really disappears.
The Church of Chaucer’s day may be gone, but the comedy of human hypocrisy—religious or otherwise—will never retire.