In characterizing the king as a lover of coarse vulgar humor, Poe alludes to two prominent French satirical writers, Rabelais and Voltaire. At the beginning of the tale, the narrator notes that:
I never knew any one so keenly alive to a joke as the king was. He seemed to live only for joking [...] About the refinements, or, as he called them, the “ghosts” of wit, the king troubled himself very little. He had an especial admiration for breadth in a jest, and would often put up with length, for the sake of it. Overniceties wearied him. He would have preferred Rabelais’ “Gargantua” to the “Zadig” of Voltaire: and, upon the whole, practical jokes suited his taste far better than verbal ones.
Though the king appreciates humor above all else, the narrator reveals that his sense of humor is not refined and intellectual, as might be expected of a king, but rather, crude and lewd. The king, the narrator notes, “would have preferred Rabelais’ ‘Gargantua’ to the ‘Zadig’ of Voltaire.” Here, the narrator alludes to two different major works of French satire. Rabelais, who wrote in the early 16th century, was known for his funny but vulgar tales of Gargantua and Pantagruel, two ill-behaved giants. Voltaire, in contrast, wrote in the 18th century Enlightenment period, and his works, such as Zadig, explore complex ideas in science and philosophy with clever wit. The king, then, has relatively little interest in the intellectual humor of Voltaire.
