The inscription to Rabelais's Gargantua:

Good friends, my Readers, who peruse this Book,
Be not offended, whilst on it you look:
Denude yourselves of all depraved affection,
For it contains no badness, nor infection:
'Tis true that it brings forth to you no birth
Of any value, but in point of mirth;
Thinking therefore how sorrow might your mind
Consume, I could no apter subject find;
One inch of joy surmounts of grief a span;
Because to laugh is proper to the man.

And the author's prologue begins:

Most noble boozers, and you my very esteemed and poxy friends - for to you and you alone are my writings dedicated - when . . .

And then a book happens.
This is a dude born in the fifteenth century. A girl sitting in the row in front of me says that it's frat humour - "Jackass for the sixteenth century". I disagree.

This is a dude writing at the same time as Luther and Calvin and other tight-collared killjoys. Yes, it's filthy and gratuitous. Yes, it's silly. It's infantile.
The man is breaking away from the early modern context. Well, sure, he makes more shit jokes than Calvin, but he's also a humanist breath of fresh air. He undoes his collar, and loosens his belt, rearranges his codpiece, and damn well takes his infantile glee in the crude. It's an affirmation of the carnal, the silly - the side of the human utterly starved by the dudes we've been reading.

Like, he starts and ends his book with these protracted, romantic riddles that mean absolutely nothing, just to stick it to the scholarly. He mocks monks, scholars, philosophers, theologians, the church, the crown, language (ah the language), himself, and just about anything else you'd care to mention. He was censored, censured, and all sorts of mean nasty stuff, and he cuts a deliciously unheroic figure. It's the first text in ages that I've read all the way through, and done so willingly.
It's a fun time.