I have an earlier answer that deals with comedy in the late Middle Ages, if you're interested!

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Medieval people were hilarious. Even better, a lot of their humor translates pretty darn well to today. It’s such a shame that we have no access to the vast, vast, vast majority of it—basically no examples of peasants’ humor, don’t know who the audience was for some of the most famous humorous literature, &c. But let’s skip that and talk about what we do know.

Street Theatre

Chilling out in a tavern with a beer or haggling with a seller of one of those newfangled “printed books” in the marketplace, you might well find yourself in the audience to, well, a flashmob! Late medieval European cities were rich terrain for shorter comic plays. The more obscene, the better, of course; the ruder, the far better.

The most famous of these are the Fastnachtspielen—Carnival plays, which is to say Mardi Gras. Of course we’re not talking topless women and re-appropriated prayer beads here, but lots of making fun of priests, monks, nuns, students, teachers, and other groups associated with the Church. Lots of accusations of sexual impropriety, of course. And generally acted in rhyming verse. These didn’t tend to have a lot of plot, although their were certainly exceptions. But a typical setup was for a group of characters to appear one by one and speak their bit.

Intriguingly, that sort of setup also seems to have been a popular street theatre genre in medieval Islamic cities, or at least, in 13th century Cairo. (Sorry, my knowledge of medieval Arabic and Persian drama is really, really limited). Like European Christian humor, Near Eastern Muslims loved puns, insults, and dirty dirty jokes at the expense of women and people of different religions.

We have the idea that the Cairene version of the “stand up and talk about what your occupation is and how you pervert it” play wasn’t limited to comic monologues. From the “play within a play” world, which doesn’t necessarily reflect reality, there seem to be those speeches interspersed with snake charmers, circus performers, and the like. (It’s possible those are just different types of theatre consolidated into one, for the purposes of the overarching play being performed).

Processions (parades) were also a big part of medieval European and Near Eastern urban life. Some were serious, but others had comedy performances among the entertainments. Our picture of this from medieval Cairo involves lots and lots of wine.

Europe got into the tavern act, too. Carnival plays were very often performed in inns. My favorite example of this is 15th century playwright and doctor (and poet, and printer, and...) Hans Folz. He was the named subject of a law saying he could not charge admission fees for his plays.

Formal Theatre

Most surviving medieval drama is religious and serious, but this is not necessarily how it was performed. These were temporarily-built outdoor stages—think a Shakespeare in the Park setup—or performed using several wagons as a stage. In a lot of them, one side of the stage was set up as hell...and tickets to sit in front of that side sold for MUCH more, because everyone wanted to laugh at the devils making fools of each other.

Convents

Unfortunately, scholars like to analyze “the uses of laughter” instead of “funny shit that went down in monasteries.” But I think we can say a little bit about the profane ways nuns and monks used humor to deal with the repetitiveness (and in some cases, especially with women, the genuine poverty and deprivation) of their lives. Certainly, theologians, preachers, and holy women spend a lot of time snarfing at nuns and monks for laughing too much and distracting themselves from God.

...And to give you an idea of this: 12th century Renaissance woman Hildegard of Bingen’s Book of the Rewards of Life is this AMAZING visions of purgatory sprawled across the surface of the Earth. And it features these awesome personifications of various deadly sins that are all kind of creepy, twisted, grotesque, just not quite right. But the sin of joking and laughing? Is simply a hunting dog. Something cute and friendly.

Well done, Hildegard.

From nuns’ writings, though, we have some examples of much more gentle humor poking fun at each other. When a beloved member of the Franciscan semi-convent (...roll with it) at Reute is caught sneaking food at night, one sister refers to her as “our little cat with two legs”—making it sound endearing rather than angry.

Convents Part 2: Manuscript Boogaloo

All right, the Internet loves weird medieval art. So did the people who made it.

From 13C-14C in particular, a not uncommon motif in the margin decorations of fancy religious books is knights fighting snails. This probably started off with some spiritual meaning, although scholars debate exactly what it was. Eventually, though, we start to see parodies of this theme—a snail shell with a head that looks like representations of Paul the Apostle, being ridden by a jousting bunny rabbit.

Medieval Christians were laughing at grotesqueries like this onstage; there is nothing to say they weren’t also funny on parchment.

Comedy and Comic Relief in Books

You might be familiar with Boccaccio’s Decameron or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (which is a ripoff of the Decameron, beeteedubs). Some of the tales within them are outright funny in and of themselves, generally satire. There are also some more serious elements, which is why I call it comic relief. Even religious literature like biographies of saints has its share of satirical bits.

Why do I mention books here, in the context of “medieval versions of stand-up”? Because books were also generally performed! Due to low literacy levels and the expense of books, a lot of medieval reading was out loud to a small group!

Unfortunately, books are also one place where we lose a lot of the context of the humor. When a bunch of dirty poems are gathered into one manuscript that is obviously very expensive, elaborate, intended for display—were these poems originally performed separately? Were they ever read at all? Who was the audience?

Courts

You’re familiar with the idea of a court jester or a fool, I presume? They did indeed form part of the entertainments on offer at feasts and other court gatherings.

Comedy and Comic Relief at Sunday School

Okay, not really Sunday school as such. But in public religious instruction—namely, sermons and poetry performances (the latter of which, more like singing concerts!).

Medieval sermons as written down are super boring. That’s because they weren’t supposed to be preached like that. The written stuff is a skeleton in Latin, meant to be translated into the local vernacular on the fly, with stories added as illustration. Of course, many of those stories were serious. But others—especially misogynist and anti-Semitic ones—had an edge of dark, wicked humor to them. (Or, apparently, outright farce, but I have only ever read about those, so cannot offer an example offhand).

Then there were the concerts. In 15C Germany, a type of poetry called Meistergesang aimed to turn poetry from literary art into a craft with guidelines, rules, and awards for technical merit. The major point was to come up with, and perform, lyrics to various melodies arranged in assorted ways. Most of these Meisterlieder are religious.

...But not all. Oh, definitely not all.

From flashmobs to cartoon doodles, I hope this gives you an idea of some of the ways medieval people enjoyed comedy in more organized settings, even if we can never eavesdrop on the day to day oral humor that goes so far to make life worth living!