Laughter and Awkwardness in Late Medieval England takes an unusual approach to an unusual topic: examining works by Augustine and thirteen late medieval authors, it aims to explore examples of the awkwardness that results from failing to fit in with social norms.

In recent years, the study of emotion has come to the fore in literary scholarship, and this is an innovative addition to work in that realm. It is innovative in other ways as well, some of them more successful than others. David Watt illustrates his analysis of awkwardness by pairing medieval texts with modern comparators: an image in the Luttrell Psalter is paired with the film Knocked Up; Pearl with Ricky Gervais’ Netflix series After Life; Cleanness with Hannah Gadsby's Nanette; Patience and Hoccleve’s Series with The Office; Mankind with Arrested Development; the Morte D'Arthur with Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Frozen; and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Book of Margery Kempe, and Hoccleve’s La Male Regle with Fleabag. Watt stops short of claiming that these medieval examples were intended to portray awkwardness. Instead, “[He] hope[s] to show that the conventions and techniques associated with some late-medieval texts might help us to understand why they might resonate with contemporary readers attuned to awkwardness” (1). So is awkwardness genuinely depicted in these medieval texts? In Watt’s explanation, it becomes a kind of Schrödinger's awkwardness, both there and not there.

Indeed, Watt’s reluctance to commit to an interpretation forms a theme of the book, and in many instances he proffers an explanation and then disavows it. He reports his daughter’s opinion that the baby in the Luttrell Psalter is “gassy” or has a “smelly bum,” but then back-pedals:

Watt’s examples are a mixed bag of instances in which people fall short of expectations—their own, their peers’, or the reader’s—or are humiliated in various ways, are reproached for poor decisions, or could have felt awkward but did not. For instance, Watt cites Augustine’s statement that in his rebellious youth he would have blushed to abide by his mother’s warning against fornicating with married women. In other words, it would have been awkward for Augustine to have obeyed his mother, though he did not, and so it was not. Augustine also would have felt awkward if, as he recounts, he had refused to accompany his friends to steal pears, but he did not refuse. Similarly, in analyzing the poem “I have A Gentil Cock,” Watt notes that if an abbot had found the poem and acknowledged its double entendres, the abbot would have felt awkward, though no abbot did, and so he didn’t. Watt suggests that in the Chester Play of Noah's Flood, Noah should feel awkward that he accepts God's instructions so readily, when he could be asking God to save more people or responding with horror to the drowning of his friends and neighbors. Since Noah does obey quickly, Watt suggests that the audience would feel awkward at Noah’s lack of awkwardness. Some readers may feel that these examples of phantom awkwardness are less persuasive than others in the book.

Although the study is positioned as a scholarly inquiry, the informality of the argument is often that of an extroverted teacher coaxing reluctant undergraduates through a text. Watt asks the reader, “What word would you use to describe what you feel when you observe the woman and child on this book's cover? Why did you choose this word and reject others?” (23). At another point he exhorts the reader to sing some lyrics, and elsewhere he opines of a nun, “This description makes her sound a lot like the type of person Aaron James describes as an asshole” (33). He brings in his own experiences, such as his personal response to Gawain's nick on the neck. “The reason that I find the description of Gawain's scar hard to stomach can be explained through the function of motor neurons” (72), he begins, in one of many instances in which he uses a kind of neuroscience lite to explain emotion. (He is also confusing motor neurons and mirror neurons.) In this instance, Gawain’s nick reminds Watt of his childhood viewing of a highlights package of National Hockey League games, in which Buffalo Sabres goaltender Clint Malarchuk was injured so graphically that “eleven fans fainted, two had heart attacks and three players vomited on the ice” (73). But is Watt’s reaction to the hockey highlights reel actually helpful in interpreting Gawain? There are important genre differences between videos and text, and in any case the point of the scene was that Gawain was not really injured at all.

Many of his interpretations will not meet with the agreement Watt seems to expect, not least because so many different interactions are subsumed under the blanket category of awkwardness. Watt concludes with the hope that these instances of awkwardness will inspire empathy, especially in

Does this chatty, free-wheeling, author-centered book persuade the reader and inspire empathy? That’s an awkward question.