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“The dirtiest story I know”: Chaucer and The Big Bang Theory

In a few weeks, the COMMode team will be jetting to Pasadena, California, for the New Chaucer Society Biennial Congress 2024. Over four days we’ll nerd out to our hearts’ content, along with a few hundred other medievalists. There are lots of reasons for medievalists to be excited about visiting Pasadena – for one thing, the nearby Huntington Library is home to the Ellesmere manuscript of The Canterbury Tales, one of the most notable and beautiful manuscripts of the text. Pasadena is also the principle setting for The Big Bang Theory, a middling sitcom that—as I’ll be discussing today—has some surprising things to say about the Father of (Obscene) English Poetry. 

For those who don’t know, The Big Bang Theory is an American sitcom that ran for an astounding twelve seasons between 2007 and 2019. Lauded in earlier seasons for its comic depiction of nerdy scientists, the show “went on for way, way longer than it should have,” regularly drawing criticism for its outrageous sexismgendered and racialized pay gaps among the main cast, and its reliance on the tropes of autism for laughs despite never addressing whether certain characters were in fact autistic.1 It’s also—to my knowledge—the only mainstream twenty-first-century television show to feature extended quotation from Chaucer, in Middle English, no less. 

Full disclosure: during the pandemic, I (Lucy) watched all 279 episodes of this television programme. And here’s a question I’m still thinking about years later: What is Chaucer doing in this show about sexist nerds? 

The simple answer is that Chaucer is doing the same thing that the Higgs boson, Star Trek trivia, and ultra-specific train-track gauges are doing in this show: building out the world of obscure academic and geek-culture references that is the show’s comedic selling point. But as I’d like to suggest, Chaucer is also doing something else in The Big Bang Theory—and here I mean doing in a more active way, one that plays into the common stereotypes about the medieval, the childish, and the normative. In this blog post, I’ll briefly explore how the show ties these things together, and what I think this tells us about Chaucerian obscenity. 

The fourteenth-century sock drawer

Amy recites The Miller's Tale.
© Warner Media

Chaucer makes his first appearance on The Big Bang Theory during a game of Truth or Dare in Season 3, Episode 8.2 At a “girls’ night” with the show’s three central female characters, the character Amy recites the closing lines of The Miller’s Tale, which include a retroactive description of one the most obscene moments in The Canterbury Tales

And Absolon hath kist hir nether ye,

And Nicholas is scalded in the towte.

This tale is doon, and God save al the rowte!

(I 3852–54)

Upon reciting these lines, Amy takes a huge swig of her drink, and her companions share their thoughts: 

PENNY: What the hell was that? [*studio laughter*]

AMY: Bernadette dared me to tell a dirty story. And The Miller’s Tale by Chaucer is the dirtiest story I know. [*studio laughter*] It would have been hidden in sock drawers if people in the fourteenth century had worn socks. [*studio laughter*]

BERNADETTE: I thought it was pretty spicy. Especially the part where he kisses her “nether ye”… [*studio laughter*]

AMY: You might not be saying that if you knew what “nether ye” meant. Hint: If you care about hygiene, you ought not be kissing it. [*studio laughter*]

There are a number of things we can notice about this brief interaction. As usual, Penny (the typical ordinary-Joe of the group) provides the ‘lay’ commentary, while Bernadette (a PhD candidate) appears to understand and enjoy the tale’s wordplay. 

For what it’s worth, I’m not convinced that Penny doesn’t understand the story. (After all, “What the hell was that?” is a perfectly reasonable reaction to an unprompted thirty-minute recitation in Middle English, not to mention the wacky goings-on in this first Canterbury fabliau.)

But what I want to focus on here is how Amy affectively handles her obscene material. Her delivery is full-voiced and earnest throughout; indeed, this is crucial to the irony that drives the scene’s comedy. Chaucer’s “dirty story” is presented as something that should be “hidden in [a] sock drawer” like pornography, and yet it is recounted by Amy with gusto. 

By contrast, both Penny and Bernadette manifest two alternative, and perhaps more socially acceptable, responses to obscenity: Penny expresses a mix of disapproval and (perhaps?) disgust, while Bernadette is furtively titillated (“pretty spicy”). Part of the humor, then, draws on another typical TBBT comedic setup: juxtaposing Penny and Bernadette’s respective femininities with Amy’s perceived lack of feminine graces. 

Both Penny and Bernadette are traditionally attractive, thin, curvy women who wear flattering clothing. They’re comfortable and at home in the space of “girls’ night” that frames Chaucer’s entry into the show. Amy, on the other hand, is portrayed as anxious and over-excited to be participating in this feminine ritual—indeed, the perceived disproportionality of her social reactions and relationships is played for laughs throughout the show’s run. For example, she calls Penny her “BFF” when they hardly know each other; wants to hold a pillow fight and do prank calls with her adult female friends at this “slumber party”; and, as we’ve just seen, surprises those new friends (and the audience) with both the explicit nature and obscure origins of her “dirty story.”3

In short, a lot of humor surrounding Amy—in this scene and throughout the show—results from her deviations from what the queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman has termed chrononormativity: broadly understood, the temporal norms that dictate when and in what order human bodies should move and change through time.4  We invoke chrononormativity when we call something or someone “too young” or “too old,” or when we make assessments about whether someone is dressing, acting, or looking “their age.” Amy is having her first “girls’ night,” but in her haltingly acceptable femininity, she’s also very much a literal “girl” in this situation, rather than a woman.

Chaucer, “girls,” and chrononormativity

What does this have to do with Chaucer, we might ask? 

First of all, Amy isn’t the only person held to chrononormative standards in the scene quoted above. Her choice of Chaucer is funny not only because it’s academic, I’d wager, but also because Chaucer is simply too old. Not only is the historical nature of The Miller’s Tale underlined by Amy’s later comment about fourteenth-century sock drawers, but she quotes the tale in Middle English—with, we should note, pretty compelling pronunciation. The temporal alterity of the language itself is obvious to anyone who hears it. The joke is in part that Amy has made a temporal miscalculation: her “dirty story” is way, way too old to be fitting for a casual twenty-first-century girls’ night. It fits the literal brief, but not the social one. 

That’s not all, though. Amy’s story—and Chaucer—is also too young. Here the humor relies on another longstanding cultural myth about the Middle Ages and its literature. According to this myth, the Middle Ages are somehow more “innocent” than later periods: a time when life was about chivalry and jousting, people were unburdened by industrial economies, nature was pristine, and bards sang of the glory of Merrie England. (And, we might add, “before” chattel slavery and the modern scourge of racism.5) In part, these assumptions derive from the way that medieval European stories such as Arthuriana have been repackaged as children’s literature in the past few centuries.6 But they’re also entwined with ideas about how the English language has “evolved” since Chaucer’s day. Hearing Amy recite in Middle English reminded me of one of the prefaces to a children’s Chaucer I encountered during my research, in which the author remarks: 

I think that much of the construction and pronunciation of [Middle English] which seems stiff and obscure to grown up people, appears easy to children, whose crude language is in many ways its counterpart.7

In other words, Chaucer’s language is the child version of modern English—and Chaucer, while hailed as the “Father of English Poetry,” is also somehow child-like. To John Dryden, Chaucer “lived in the Infancy of our Poetry,” and “We must be Children before we grow men.”8 And as Steve Ellis puts it in Chaucer At Large, there’s a prevailing notion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of Chaucer as “a child moving in a child’s world.”9 

What’s more, the equation of medieval literature with Amy’s non-chrononormativity gets repeated consistently on the show, across four of its eleven seasons.10 To cite just one example, consider this conversation from Season 7, Episode 3, between Amy and Howard, one of the show’s marquee “adorkable misogynists”: 

AMY: We don’t have a lot in common. Penny warned me never to get into a car alone with you. 

HOWARD: Yeah… but I bet we have more in common than we think.

AMY: I like harps, Little House on the Prairie, medieval poetry, medieval literature—

HOWARD: How about some music?11

Here “medieval literature” appears in the same breath as a children’s book series and the instrument that Amy has played since childhood, just after she invokes “Stranger Danger” in Penny’s warning “never to get into a car alone with” Howard. 

As frustrating as it is to watch season after season of mockery and pejoration aimed at Amy for her chrononormative “failures” throughout The Big Bang Theory, the final mention of Chaucer in the show is spoken by Sheldon, by then her life partner, who cites her affinity for The Canterbury Tales as part of his esteem for her:  

SHELDON: Let’s see, what do I know about Amy? She loves medieval literature — Chaucer’s her favorite…

BERNADETTE: Wow. You really do love her. 

SHELDON: I do.12

There is a subtle diss embedded in these lines (“Wow”), but unlike any other character on the show, Sheldon—a character who famously refuses to say “ass,” “bullshit,” or “fuck”—accepts and even admires Amy’s love for Chaucer. 

To be sure, there are still ways that this episode mocks both characters’ affinity for things that are simultaneously too young and too old. For example, the above conversation is prompted by Amy’s spontaneous kissing of Sheldon under mistletoe, which makes him feel he is in a “sex show”; meanwhile, true to her historical fantasies, Amy is throwing a traditional Victorian Christmas party featuring children’s games. 

For now, my point is this: In addition to injecting the show with the “adorkability” The Big Bang Theory is famous for, Chaucer underlines the many ways that Amy doesn’t fit traditional and overlapping norms about gender, temporality, and social interaction. And I’d even argue that, while we might disagree with the writers’ choices to base their humor off these types of deviance, Chaucer is uniquely positioned to function in this way. As the flagship author of medieval English, Chaucer’s work is just mainstream enough to represent all medieval literature, and the blend of too-young/too-old that it’s called upon to signify here. And as the author of recognisable obscene literature, Chaucer also comes to embody the way that Amy’s own sexuality comes into conflict with the childlike and/or non-sexual inner life that her peers imagine for her. 

The lines Amy quotes from The Miller’s Tale are carefully chosen to create a quick laugh as well as shore up one of the show’s longest-running gags: Amy as a girl-child who’s learning and often failing at being an acceptable woman. The show’s references to Chaucer consistently reinforce the idea that Amy is haltingly discovering her sexuality, learning to be a properly coded feminine being, and that before she meets other individuals who can teach her, her only ideas about female sexuality have come from the unlikeliest of sources, a quaint medieval poet known for his “dirty stories.” We could even argue that Chaucer’s obscenity ends up highlighting another borderline-obscene set-piece in the show: a child who’s semi-obliviously reading erotica for the entertainment of “real” adults. If I ever re-watch The Big Bang Theory—a big ‘if,’ I must say—I’ll be paying closer attention to how its humor around Chaucer and medieval literature relies on the biases we hold about both. 


[1] Note that some of the links here use outdated language to describe autism. 

[2] “The 21-Second Excitation,” The Big Bang Theory (CBS, November 11, 2010).

[3] There’s more to unpack here about the undertones of queerness encapsulated by Amy (and occasionally mocked in the show’s scripts), which deserves more discussion, but which I don’t have space to do justice here. 

[4] Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Perverse Modernities (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 64. Freeman also (and more frequently) applies the term to structures. 

[5] On the various ways that this belief is misguided and even harmful, see, for example, Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

[6] For more on this, see Elly McCausland, Malory’s Magic Book: King Arthur and the Child, 1862–1980, Arthurian Studies, LXXXVI (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2019).

[7] Mary Eliza Haweis, Chaucer for Children: A Golden Key (1876; repr., London: Chatto & Windus, 1877), ix.

[8] John Dryden, “Preface,” in Fables Ancient and Modern; Translated into Verse from Homer, Ovid, Boccacce, & Chaucer: With Original Poems (London: Jacob Tonson, 1700), [8]. 

[9] Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the Modern Imagination (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 57.

[10] See, e.g., “The Tangible Affection Proof,” The Big Bang Theory (CBS, February 14, 2013); “The Scavenger Vortex,” The Big Bang Theory (CBS, October 3, 2013); “The Friendship Turbulence,” The Big Bang Theory (CBS, March 6, 2014); “The Clean-Room Infiltration,” The Big Bang Theory (CBS, December 11, 2014).

[11] “The Scavenger Vortex.”

[12] “The Clean-Room Infiltration.”


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Lucy Fleming (July 1, 2024). “The dirtiest story I know”: Chaucer and The Big Bang Theory. COMMode. Retrieved May 17, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/11x17


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