For six hours on 1 April 2023, April Fools’ Day, the Old Library opened its doors to the public for a Cambridge Festival exhibition on fools, hoaxes, pranks and jokes. 449 people viewed a selection of medieval manuscripts, rare printed books, historic press cuttings and unusual artifacts, in the beautiful 17^th-century surroundings.

What follows here is not quite a reproduction of that exhibition; rather, it is a selection of significant items, accompanied by new text exploring some of the suggestions and implications that might have been burdensome for an in-person event, but are worth thinking about from a distance and at leisure. The curator’s note that follows explains more.

We begin with a challenge.

This lump of lead is taken from the skull of a lead-filled skeleton discovered in 1619 in Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire.

This black metal case, usually kept in the College Archives, was the one traditionally used, until about 1805, to present ousted Fellows of St John’s with their severance pay and related documents.

And the holes in the book, a volume of Heinrich Meibom’s Rerum Germanicarum from 1688, are bullet-holes.

Strange. And true?

The truth – part of the truth – is that none of these claims is definitely true. They haven't been verified. The lump of lead might just be a lump of lead (although the story about the skeleton can be found in John Weever's 1631 work Ancient Funerall Monuments). The tin might not be the one used in the defunct College ritual (which, full disclosure, might have carried on a little after 1805, that being simply the date of the final extant reference to it). And the holes in the book could have been caused by bullets, but this has not been demonstrated conclusively; and if it were to be, there would of course be many more questions to ask.

Another part of the truth is: one of these claims is definitely false. Because the curator just made it up.

You can skip to this page's conclusion to find out which is the unquestionably invented claim. But before doing so, ask yourself: did you believe every claim as it arose? Was this because of the context: an academic institution's website, in an exhibition written by a librarian? Did have something to do with the amount of detail given, or how much you wanted the claim to be true?

And, now that you know that all three might be false and one definitely is, which do you think is the trick? And why?

Jokes contain little clues as to their designs upon us. The likelihood is that few people reading this, upon having somebody in the room say to them 'Knock, knock', would take this as a request for admission; not many would, on being asked about a chicken crossing a road or told of a man walking into a bar, demand to be shown CCTV footage or to read an eyewitness account. But even setting aside specific joke forms and genres, there are certain tones and cadences that signify the fictional, constructed nature of what we are reading or hearing: tones and cadences that one might manipulate (per the comedian Stewart Lee in the imminent clip) to achieve new effects, and that one might have to avoid when narrating something true.

Just as a well-executed bit of rhythm can create a joke out of something not otherwise funny, so a failed or outdated bit of rhythm can drain a joke of its effectiveness.

The Jokes of the Cambridge Coffee-houses in the Seventeenth Century, edited by James Orchard Halliwell and held at the Library in printings from 1841 and 1842, is a compilation of jokes and anecdotes from various jest-books. Each jest has a title, which is of course always a sign that something funny is about to occur, and efforts include the following.

A Dangerous Generalization

A tutor bidding one of his pupils, whose name was Charles Howl, to make some English verses, and seeing he put teeth to rhyme with feet, told him he was wrong there, as that was no proper rhyme. Charles answered, ‘You have often told me that H was no letter, and therefore this is good rhyme.’ His tutor said, ‘Take heed, Charles, of that evasion, for that will make you an owl.’

Oxford and Cambridge Actors

King James had two comedies acted before him, the one at Cambridge, the other at Oxford; that at Cambridge was called Ignoramus, an ingenious thing, wherein one Mr Sleep was a principal actor; that other at Oxford was but a dull piece, and therein Mr Wake was a prime actor. Which made his Majesty merrily to say, that in Cambridge one sleep made him wake, and in Oxford one wake made him sleep.

The Doctor Puzzled

A gentleman who was very lame in one of his legs, without any outward show of anything, having sent for the surgeon, he, more honest than ordinary, told him it was in vain to meddle with it, for it was only old age that was the cause. 'But why then,' said the gentleman, 'should not my other leg be as lame as this, seeing that the one is no older than the other?'

The Advertisement at the beginning of the book describes the aim as that of preserving the history a kind of book since supplanted by periodicals, and of showing 'the state of this class of literature during that period'. The state of it indeed, one might respond. But in all seriousness, there is surely something to be learned in looking at these jokes, figuring out how their content might be better delivered today... and then questioning if 'better' is the right word when the dynamics of societal conditioning and expectation are in play.

Of course, people in different cultural settings, time periods or seats at a comedy club can have different ideas of what's funny with respect to content as well as to form. A joke on a particular topic might seem to be 'too soon', some temporal distance being required between the subject and the joke before levity is considered acceptable; or a joke can be based on outdated or offensive constructs, the consensus now being that that sort of thing isn't funny. The latter certainly applies to the Library's book of Bogg-witticisms, or, Dear Joy's Common-places.

The genre of the 'Irish joke' – in the sense of a joke about stereotypical Irish stupidity rather than of a joke told by somebody Irish (this second being an infinitely superior beast) – will be familiar to some readers; it warmed the curator's heart, the day of the physical exhibition, to overhear a parent explain to a teenager that this was the sort of joke some people used to make and don't any longer. Bogg-witticisms, published in 1682, is credited to one Mac O Bonnielabbero, allegedly of Drogheda. It purports to be 'a compleat collection of the most profound punns, learned bulls, elaborate quibbles, and wise sayings of some of the natives of Teague-Land, shet fourd' – and here is where a 17th-century printed representation of an Irish accent comes into play – 'vor generaul noddificautshion, and coullected bee de grete caare and painsh-tauking of oour laurned countree-maun' (i.e. 'set forth for general notification, and collected by the great care and painstaking of our learned countryman').

More of this sort of thing characterises the witticisms proper, as can be seen in this example. 'Dear Joy' was a mocking term for an Irish person.

A Dear Joy having been on a time advanc’d from skipping over the Boggs, to ride on Horse-back; his Footman follow’d smoothing the Horse on the Buttocks with his hand; at which the Jade kick’t him on the shins; the Footman enrag’d, threw a Stone at the Horse, and hit his new Master smartly betwixt the Shoulders; who (suddenly looking back) demanded, Whaat ish de matter? His man reply’d, (holding his Legg) Sir, your Horse hath almost broken my Legg, with the kick he gave me: Now de Dee’l tauke me, (reply’d he) if he hauve not a-mosht broke mee back with de kick he gauve me betwixt de Shoulder, and if it cause me Death within twelve months and a day, I will e’ne see him hang’d for it, indeed.

The contrivance, the accent, and the confused nature of the punchline (is the joke that the horseman thinks he was hit by a hoof rather than a stone, or that he thinks he'll be able to have a horse hanged, or that he thinks he'll be able to do so after he's died?): even if one ignores the offensive context, one might struggle to laugh. But remember: somebody wrote this and somebody published it; some people, once upon a time, thought this was comedy gold, and one might ask in what ways, and why, times have changed.

The final exhibit of this online version contains three items from the Library's collection of medieval manuscripts. And while these items are not funny – although not, you might respond, much unfunnier than some of those coffee-house jokes – they might, as a gathering, still prompt some of the questions that have run throughout the exhibition. What are we being told, and why? Why do we believe or disbelieve it? And what are the subtle differences, item to item, in how the claim is presented and in how we are prompted to respond?

All three manuscripts include an illustration of Psalm 53 (or 52 in the numbering system of the time). The Psalm begins: ‘Dixit insipiens in corde suo, non est deus’; that is, ‘The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.’ And here are the three representations of that initial 'D'.

D.30, written in England, is a 14th-century psalter that once belonged to Simon de Montacute, Bishop of Ely 1337–1345.

E.15 is a 13th-century psalter of Flemish origin.

And N.8 is a (small, tightly bound and consequently hard to photograph) 13th-century Bible from France.

It could be argued that these are all, essentially, the same image, part of a tradition: in the opening D of a psalm that mentions fools, you depict a fool. But when a curator brings items together because of their similarities, their differences are inevitably highlighted. Whereas in D.30 a king (presumably David) tries to direct the fool’s attention to a visible God, in E.15 the king points heavenward but not to any perceptible deity, and in N.8 the image depicts only a fool with a club and a cake. Three similar illustrations to the same bit of text become, in the context of a particular arrangement, three different takes on that text, inflecting the claim in different ways, implying various stances on folly and on faith.

Even if no actual deception is intended (as with the first set of exhibits, whose origins are explained below), a curator's arrangement of items, and commentary upon them, will always be a trick of sorts. Information is presented or withheld for all sorts of reasons (thematic relevance; space; personal enthusiasm); you as a visitor are not in a position to respond entirely neutrally. You can hope – but also become ever better at determining – that this trick is in the spirit of an engaging story or a halfway decent joke, rather than that of a lie.