Ira Regis: Comedic Inflections of Royal Rage in Jewish Court Tales

This article deals with the largely unexplored motif of royal anger in the Jewish court tales. In addition to presenting material on the motif's distribution, lexical and syntactical profile, and narrative function, I argue that Daniel 2, 3, Esther, and Bel and the Snake develop the motif of the king's anger along comedic lines. These humorous depictions of royal anger, of course, did not take place in isolation from their narrative surroundings. Rather, they were part of a general trend at work in the genre to demystify the king by subjecting him and his habitat to comedic representation. The king, in these tales, is wrenched from the realm of myth and ritual and squarely placed into crosshairs of the comedian. I further argue that such representations of the king are what James Scott refers to as "hidden transcripts"—a subordinate form of critical discourse that often manifests itself in "rumor, gossip, folktales, jokes, songs, rituals, codes, and euphemisms…." These findings, in turn, are related to the broader body of scholarly literature on Jewish humor, ancient and contemporary.