What is "droll"

Droll \Droll\, v. t.

1. To lead or influence by jest or trick; to banter or jest; to cajole.

   Men that will not be reasoned into their senses, may yet be laughed or drolled into them.
   --L'Estrange.

2. To make a jest of; to set in a comical light. [R.]

   This drolling everything is rather fatiguing. -- W. D. Howells.

Droll \Droll\ (dr[=o]l), a. [Compar. Droller; superl. Drollest.] [F. dr[^o]le; cf. G. & D. drollig, LG. drullig, D. drol a thick and short person, a droll, Sw. troll a magical appearance, demon, trolla to use magic arts, enchant, Dan. trold elf, imp, Icel. tr["o]ll giant, magician, evil spirit, monster. If this is the origin, cf. Trull.] Queer, and fitted to provoke laughter; ludicrous from oddity; amusing and strange.

Syn: Comic; comical; farcical; diverting; humorous; ridiculous; queer; odd; waggish; facetious; merry; laughable; ludicrous. -- Droll, Laughable, Comical. Laughable is the generic term, denoting anything exciting laughter or worthy of laughter; comical denotes something of the kind exhibited in comedies, something humorous of the kind exhibited in comedies, something, as it were, dramatically humorous; droll stands lower on the scale, having reference to persons or things which excite laughter by their buffoonery or oddity. A laughable incident; a comical adventure; a droll story.

Droll \Droll\, n.

1. One whose practice it is to raise mirth by odd tricks; a jester; a buffoon; a merry-andrew.
   --Prior.

2. Something exhibited to raise mirth or sport, as a puppet, a farce, and the like.

Droll \Droll\, v. i. [imp. & p. p. Drolled; p. pr. & vb. n. Drolling.] To jest; to play the buffoon. [R.]

1620s, from French drôle "odd, comical, funny" (1580s), in Middle French a noun meaning "a merry fellow," possibly from Middle Dutch drol "fat little fellow, goblin," or Middle High German trolle "clown," ultimately from Old Norse troll "giant, troll" (see troll (n.)). Related: Drolly; drollish.

1. oddly humorous; whimsical, amusing in a quaint way; waggish n. (context archaic English) A buffoon v

2. (context archaic English) To joke, to jest.

adj. comical in an odd or whimsical manner; "a droll little man with a quiet tongue-in-cheek kind of humor"

A droll is a short comical sketch of a type that originated during the Puritan Interregnum in England. With the closure of the theatres, actors were left without any way of plying their art. Borrowing scenes from well-known plays of the Elizabethan theatre, they added dancing and other entertainments and performed these, sometimes illegally, to make money. Along with the popularity of the source play, material for drolls was generally chosen for physical humor or for wit.

Francis Kirkman's The Wits, or Sport Upon Sport, 1662, is a collection of twenty-seven drolls. Three are adapted from Shakespeare: Bottom the Weaver from A Midsummer Night's Dream, the gravedigger's scene from Hamlet, and a collection of scenes involving Falstaff called The Bouncing Knight. A typical droll presented a subplot from John Marston's The Dutch Courtesan; the piece runs together all the scenes in which a greedy vintner is gulled and robbed by a deranged gallant.

Just under half of the drolls in Kirkman's book are adapted from the work of Beaumont and Fletcher. Among the drolls taken from those authors are Forc'd Valour (the title plot from The Humorous Lieutenant), The Stallion (the scenes in the male brothel from The Custom of the Country), and the taunting of Pharamond from Philaster. The prominence of Beaumont and Fletcher in this collection prefigures their dominance on the early Restoration stage. The extract from their Beggar's Bush, known as The Lame Commonwealth, features additional dialogue, strongly suggesting it was taken from a performance text. The character of Clause, the King of the Beggars in that extract, appears as a character in later works, such as the memoirs of Bampfylde Moore Carew, the self-proclaimed King of the Beggars.

Actor Robert Cox was perhaps the best-known of the droll performers.