In these tales of bad wives the intent is nearly always humorous, and there seems little or no tendency to wish to point a moral. The same attitude applies to tales about lazy persons. The writer of pious stories and exemplary anecdotes may try to preach a sermon on the evils of unfaithfulness or of indolence, but the story which keeps being told is the one in which these failings appear in some light that is laughable or at least mildly amusing. The most popular stories about lazy men are concerned with absurd cases of extreme laziness. Sometimes the thread that holds a series of such anecdotes together is a contest in which each person cites instances of his unwillingness to move (W111.1; Type 1950). Such contests are recounted in the Gesta Romanorum and in nearly all later books of anecdotes, and they appear in folktale collections from nearly all parts of Europe, though none seem to have thus far been reported outside that continent. Numerous stories are told about lazy servants. Such a one is asked whether it is raining. Instead of going out, he calls in the dog and feels of his paws. In a variant, he is to find whether there is fire in the house. He feels of the cat to see if she is warm. These two are essentially literary anecdotes. But the tale about the boy who eats his breakfast, his dinner, and his supper, one immediately after the [p. 211] other, and then lies down to sleep is well known all over eastern Europe (W111.2.6; Type 1561).

As might be expected, the lazy wife does not get off unscathed, though the tales of this class show neither the originality nor the interest to be found in stories of shrews or overbearing women. Of this group, perhaps the best known, at least in eastern Europe, is the tale of the cat which is beaten for not working. During the beating the lazy wife must hold the cat, and she gets well scratched (W111.3.2; Type 1370*).

A thorough exploration of these tales of laziness would take one through most of the literary collections of tales, both in Europe and the Orient, for many of them have considerable antiquity and have been repeated by nearly everyone who has issued a book of anecdotes.