Humor

“Waiter, waiter! Bring me a crocodile sandwich, and make it snappy!”

Food humor probably has as long a history as food. What passes for humor, however, has changed over the years. A kind of humor modern Americans would find strange or even unnerving marked the banquets of the Romans and continued through the Middle Ages. From ancient Rome came “flying pies” immortalized in the nursery rhyme about “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.” These pies consisted of empty shells with lids baked separately that, after baking and cooling, had birds put inside them to be released in the banquet hall for the amusement and entertainment of the guests.