Laughter is not just the creation myth, the key to our identity and our past. It is a practical solution for our future. It allows us to blaspheme against authority, and blasphemy saves us. Enlighteners would undoubtedly hate this idea, mostly because laughter cannot be rationalized, systemized, controlled. They demand certainties, ignoring how certainty does not fit the world. They rewrite the history of the world into something which fits certainty. They deny thousands of years’ history of folk humor by refusing to retell it. 

This impoverishment persists despite pushback against a totally rational view of the world. We think history is boring. We look back on history and see a world without humor because we are not taught about the jokes.
	Bakhtin describes folk humor through the carnivals of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as transgressive in ways the teleological view of history would like to assume is fairly new. Carnivals reversed and eliminated hierarchies, played with and erased boundaries, and did this all within a framework of grotesque realism and ambivalent humor. The interactions between human bodies and the outside world are emphasized, meaning there is a focus on bodily functions such as eating, defecating, birthing, and what Bakhtin (or to be fair, translator Helene Iswolsky) calls “fecundating”. All of these elements at the time contained both creative and destructive connotations, and within the culture of folk humor did not imply the disgust and repulsion they have in the post-Enlightenment world. Bakhtin defends the grotesque as universal:
The censored canon of the Enlightenment fails the historical test. Grotesque imagery has always existed, and always will, however it may be shoved off to the side. In contrast, the imagery of closed off, rational bodies does not hold up for Bakhtin. He is concerned with the placement of the grotesque: after the Enlightenment, bodily imagery has been placed in an individualistic context which robs it of its ambivalence. Montaigne criticizes a certain denial of the grotesque, noting a change in attitudes around the end of the sixteenth century:
Montaigne’s discussion mirrors 21st century debates about film ratings that sharply limit sexual imagery while having no such compunction about violence. It really is incredible how little sense of history most people have and how little progress post-Enlightenment thinkers have made against Enlightenment mores in the most recent half millennium. Montaigne argues that the censorship of official literature has little to do with morality. Bakhtin quotes him to show that the real cause of censorship is a need to show human beings as individual and separate from each other by simply blocking out the rest of the story.
	As little as we may think of certain effects of the Enlightenment, we cannot choose to go back to the carnivals of medieval times in order to recapture the carnivalesque spirit. A few notes on the workings of the carnivalesque offer some suggestions on how folk humor - its ambivalence, grotesque imagery, and reversals of hierarchy - has moved forward. Carnivals usually lasted a total of a few months per year, and during this time:
