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Anecdote, Comic

Anecdotes are short narratives that recount remarkable events that may have happened to a historical person and are remembered because of their witty or humorous ending. Despite the regular references to historically important persons or historically documented events, anecdotes are not necessarily factual reports. In fact, the anecdote's function as a form to narrate something symptomatic or characteristic of a historical personality, a social prototype, or a historical situation is more important than the representation of authentic events.

Comic anecdotes evolved from a genre of historiography. The following explanations will, therefore, differentiate between historiographic anecdotes and comic anecdotes.

Historiographical Anecdotes

In Greek, the word anecdota originally meant “unpublished writings”: In its original sense, it was used to refer to texts that had never been published before. In particular, it was used to refer to the Historia Arcana (“Secret History”) by the Byzantine historian Procopius (500–565). The Historia Arcana was not published during Procopius's life time, as it told the unofficial story of Emperor Justinian's cruelty and his wife Theodora's licentious behavior.

As can be seen from the etymology, the word existed before the genre was developed. Nevertheless, the particular notion of the unofficial and secret historical record provided by Procopius's Historia Arcana was very influential in making the word fashionable again in aristocratic France in the 17th century. For instance, Antoine de Varillas's Les anecdotes de Florence ou L’histoire secrète de la maison de Médicis (1689) provided an account of lesser known events surrounding the Medici family, who had ruled Florence for several centuries and also had ties to French royalty. However, de Varillas's use of the plural anecdotes is no longer related to the editorial history of his text but to his report of a variety of incidents: such historiographic anecdotes which, according to Sonja Hilzinger (1997), tell a “true, previously unknown, curious event” typically centered on biographical details. This historicobiographical interest can also be found in Horace Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762). Nevertheless, in general there is a notable shift away from anecdotes about important persons to what we today might call “human interest stories.” Anecdotes as human interest stories (or fait divers, as discussed in works by Roland Barthes and Lionel Gossman) contain within themselves all the information necessary to cause astonishment but provide little contextually valuable information. Moreover, they have also developed into independent textual units that increasingly take as their subject matter individual events that do not need to be presented in any particular chronological or causal order. This co-textual independence of anecdotes allows, for instance, encyclopedic formats ordered in terms of themes or personalities, for example, in Guillaume-Thomas Raynal's (1750) Anecdotes littéraires: Ou Histoire de ce que est arrivé le plus singulier, & de plus intéressant aux Ecrivains François Vol. 1 (Literary Anecdotes or History of the Most Unique and Interesting Events That Happened to French Writers Vol. 1).

Comic Anecdote

The growing association of anecdotes with human interest stories had a lasting influence on the development of the genre. Since the end of the 18th century, collections of anecdotes have tended to provide more amusement and entertainment than information. This development from historiographic anecdote to entertaining anecdote was described by Hilzinger in terms of a gradual decline into an “epigonic period.” This disdainful view of the further development of the anecdote during the 19th century is particularly pronounced in German studies (German literature contains anecdotes written by canonical authors such as Heinrich von Kleist, 1777–1811). To some extent, such judgments might indeed be justified by the growing lack of differentiation between anecdotes and obviously fictional jokes. Nevertheless, this development can be seen to be at the root of the comic anecdote, one of the dominant humorous narrative forms of the 19th and 20th centuries.

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