One of the best examples of medieval humor is used in “The Reeve's Tale,” part of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. "The Reeve's Tale" excellently displays the bawdy sexual humor that was popular in medieval culture and present in other works of the period, such as Boccacio's The Decameron, which may have had an influence on Chaucer. Sexual humor is often discussed in “The Reeve's Tale” and is quite evident in the text through the use of puns, double entenders, symbolism, and medieval sexual tropes. However, “The Reeve's Tale” also introduces a new, more complex form of humor, probably invented by Chaucer, the satirization of dialects. Chaucer broke new ground by writing in the vernacular English of the people, rather than French or Latin, the popular medieval intellectual and diplomatic languages, and in doing so Chaucer was able to more effectively characterize people from different regions in his tales. This imitation of accents allows Chaucer to make “The Reeve's Tale” a social commentary on class. "The Reeve's Tale" also demonstrates Chaucer's role as a Cambridge writer, fashioning one of the first mentions of Cambridge in English literature. “The Reeve's Tale” exploits humor through the satirization of Northern dialects and the class conflict between “town and dress.” Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay One of the most important uses of humor in "The Reeve's Tale" is easily overlooked without further linguistic understanding. Chaucer uses a specific type of topical humor that satirizes students' accents in the way he writes a northern dialect. This would be understood by his audience and made increasingly clear when they read his works aloud. Some literary historians argue that this is the first use of dialect for comedy in English literature (Taylor 468). There are two dialects imitated here, that of the students, John and Aleyn, and also Reeve's narrator himself. The employees come from the North, as evidenced by lines 160-161. “Of what country they were born, that high Strother, / Fer in the north – I know not where.” Although unspecified, Strother may be referring to Northumberland, further strengthened by the replacement of the long a with a normally long o, and the use of the words "boes", "lathe", "fonne" and "hethyng", which contribute to the comic dialect of the north that Chaucer is imitating. Chaucer did not choose this dialect by chance. He worked at the court of Richard II during the Anglo-Scottish Wars, when the division between North and South intensified and the inhabitants of the North were seen as wild and rebellious. Although “The Reeve's Tale” is a product of this period of turmoil, it is unclear whether Chaucer seeks to destigmatize the enemy in pursuit of national unity or whether he seeks to valorize the otherness of northerners in favor of the London dialect as an appropriate form. The Reeve is from Norfolk and his North East Midland dialect is represented in the prologue through the use of "ik", "ilke" and "so theek" (Garbaty 5). The London public would have known the Norfolk man as an immigrant and a “foreigner” who represented competition in the job market. “'That one of the meanest people in The Canterbury Tales comes from Norfolk seems like a gratuitous insult, and one suspects that Chaucer is playing on Londoners' contempt for...immigrants'” (Taylor 473). In London, this dialectical humor of representing the “other” by ridiculing a foreign accent would have been easily understood. The mere mention of Norfolk or the north where the students are from, would conjure up a specific stereotypical image of.