This article explores how Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury
Tales seems to embody comedy and the carnivalesque in a quite
interesting way, where the poet introduces a medieval culture
and a medieval popular life that may not be so familiar, to
modem readers. It is the carnival world of medieval popular life
as explored by the Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin and which
reached us in certain survivals of celebrations and images of
carnivals, circuses, caricature, and comic spectacles. Carnival
imagery is placed before us in The canterbury Tales through the
General Prologue and in many of the tales where many
characters are put in public squares as wild men and women,
mocked, overblown, and turned up-side down from holy figures
into clowns. Chaucer portrays in many of his stories such images
of comedy and mockery that are associated with the pilgrims
themselves, whose behaviour on the pilgrimage is the
embodiment of the carnivalesque proper. The Canterbury Tales:
reveals how Chaucer seems to create his heroes from the circus,
the carnival, the fair, and the game-shows, the place which is
thought of as low, dirty, demonized and extraterritorial. This.
article, reveals how Chaucer actually inverts in a carnivalesque
manner most of medieval cultural values in a manner which
exhibits his criticism and mockery of most dominated
ideological representations of culture.