I might prefer to say, the devil was sometimes a comic relief figure in the late Middle Ages. The slapstick and scatalogical humor associated with Satan and his minions was primarily a feature of late medieval civic drama. And it was a popular one. When the town of Chateaundun put on its annual Passion play, with Heaven set on one side of the large stage and Hell on the other, the seats in front of Hell cost rather more money.

But there are other ways to play the Fool besides a clown. Looking at that will get us closer to why audiences loved to laugh at the devil--and closer to the creeping fear that lay behind the laughter.

In late medieval sermon stories and didactic (educational) poems, the devil sometimes plays a role that seems odd at first: narrator of the life of Christ. Of course, Christian theology and apocryphal tradition make this perfectly logical; who else is present at every major event in his life and death? But texts as famous as Piers Plowman (yeah, yeah, "famous"...fite me) have another use for the devil besides convenience: he can be wrong.

Here, the devil is fool not in the comic-comedy sense, but in the psalmist's manner: "The Fool has said in his heart that there is no God." In this case, where Satan both knows God exists and acts like God exists (the different interpretations of that verse), the Fool has said in his heart that Jesus is not God. Throughout the sermons and poems that feature the devil telling the audience the story of Christ's life, he fails to realize this truth well-known to listeners and readers. There is humor here, but it is a deep irony rather than giggles or guffaws.

The idea of the Great Deceiver as instead deceived served an important pastoral function that, ultimately, connects with a major, major shift in fundamental theology that occurred in the 11th-12th century. The sermons and other didactic texts--and, yes, the street plays where demons sling shit at each other and drag around a hellmouth on wheels--place the audience in a position where they know more than the Satan. The devil doesn't understand the star and other signs at the birth of Jesus; the audience knows it's because God has become human, and so forth.

Of course there's an anti-Semitic lining here, because medieval Christianity. The devil is equated with evil is equated with not recognizing the divinity of Christ despite exposure to all the signs. Just like, say, a certain religious minority group suffering frequent exile and mass murder throughout western Europe? Right. But the central thrust of the message that the audience knows more than the devil is to limit the devil's power over the audience. Deceived and foolish, he is brought down from an infernal pedestal. The devil no longer stands between humans and God; he is merely waiting if humans turn away from God.

It's no accident that growth of the devil as Fool takes root in the twelfth century. The trope is the outgrowth of the devil's loss of power with respect to the fancy word soteriology, or theology of salvation. Early medieval Christianity is associated with a couple aspects of soteriology, namely the "Christus Victor" idea of Christ, and the "devil's rights" theory of human sin and salvation. Here, the devil is the default possessor of human souls thanks to the Fall (of Adam and Eve), and Christ through the cross and resurrection wins them back.

But right around the turn of the twelfth century, a monk-bishop-theologian named Anselm--you might know him for the so-called "ontological argument" that modern-day philosophers call a proof of God's existence--wrote a text usually known by its Latin name, Cur Deus Homo. (Translated "why God became hu/man," but much funnier taken literally as "Why the God-Man.") In Cur Deus Homo, Anselm lays out the soteriology that was more or less adopted by the rest of medieval Latin Europe. Christ's suffering and death on the cross made up for ("satisfied") the inherited debt humans owe God for the fall. It turns the crucifixion into atonement, and makes Christ's death and resurrection matters of justice.

And, indeed, it has the effect of side-bumping the devil right out of the soteriological picture. Perhaps like the Egyptian goddess-demon Ammut, Satan is reduced to waiting by the wayside to trap humans who mirror the Fall with their own fall.

But just because the devil was framed as less of a threat in some religious texts and teachings is not at all the same thing as saying evil was less of a threat. In fact, many scholars will talk about the "infernalization" or "diabolization" of pastoral teaching about demons, purgatory, and sin over the course of the later Middle Ages. A big reason for this was the expanding audience of the Church. From sometime in the twelfth century on, Church leaders started to realize they had a problem: average lay people (from nobles to peasants) were taking a serious interest in religion that the Church did not have priests and preachers to meet, and so they were developing their own interpretations and modes of teaching in the stead.

With the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 as the watershed-marker year (but obviously changes began before then and only gradually took effective root), the Church creakily mobilized to provide pastoral care/religious instruction to the laity. Its major focus was moral; its major vehicle for teaching morality the avoidance of sin; the major framework for teaching about sin the virtues and vices (as in "seven deadly," but also any set of numbered lists)...and between those two, by FAR the preferred option, the vices. They were considered more memorable, more likely to stick in people's minds and convince them to behave well...through fear of hell.

Definitely not all, but a lot of thirteenth and fourteenth-century religious instruction focused on the dangers of hell and the pains of purgatory. Note that purgatory is not an "either/or" case: it's a place where people already destined to heaven go after death to do the penance for their sins they ran out of time to do before dying. And yet, as the decades drew on, purgatory began to look a lot more like hell. That's just one example of the encroaching terror of evil, hell, and damnation in late medieval Christianity, as I've discussed earlier on AH.

Now, these are Bad Things, not Satan. But there are two things we need to keep in mind. First, the devil in Christianity has always been a creature of the folk as much as the theologians. (One of the major developments in the last generations of witch trial research has been the recognition that witch panic was not just a top-down imposition, but arose out of villages and towns as much as universities and cathedral chapters). So while Satan may have receded in his fearsomeness within Christianity, the evil spirits lurking in the corners and in the dark lost none of their power in folk belief. (You see, /u/itsallfolklore? I am finally learning!)

Second, you might have picked up on the slight problem within the Christian theological tradition. The power of the devil was reduced but the power and presence of damnation and the abode of the devil, hell, increased. That...that makes God out to be kind of the bad guy here.

So in the works of VIP fifteenth-century theologians like Johannes Nider (inspiration for Heinrich Kramer in writing the Malleus Maleficarum...yes, THAT Malleus Maleficarum), a split starts to emerge. On one hand, Nider, Jean Gerson, and others focus on consolation. As pastors in the "shepherds gently leading lambs" sense, they offer troubled souls consolation in the face of the uncertainty of salvation--basically, promises of God's goodness and mercy AND of the human ability to earn it. And as pastors in the "shepherds hoping they're not stuck with goats" sense, they bring back the devil. And this time, not as deceived, but as deceiver.

The devil is no longer waiting, but lying in wait, ready to lure people in. For most people, this means entrapment in sin, and entanglement in the impulse to actively turn away from God's willing mercy because the person believes they cannot merit it, or are not possible of wanting it badly enough to receive it. But, say Nider, Kramer, and a hundred thousand witnesses in court, for some people this means giving in to false promises of magic and power in exchange for a sexually-charged pact with Satan: the blackened heart of early modern witchcraft.

And so we should keep in mind: when people laughed at the devil, were they seeking comic relief for the Passion play onstage--or relief from an itching fear that the devil had his fingers around their soul?