This article was written with the generous support of the Swiss National Science Foundation, who funded an eighteen-month research sabbatical at the University of Edinburgh. It offers a different strategy as to how a critic might approach the question of humour in the early English Slaughter of the Innocents plays. Without trying to delimit the moments in which humour is identifiable, I suggest that paying attention to the use of emotion in the plays, and how it relates to rapid changes in action and tone, goes some way to thinking about how humour might work within the dramatic shape of the six surviving episodes. The complexity of the emotional responses that I argue are demanded from an audience works with rather than against the sacred content, even when such responses include laughter, and requires paradigms of investigation that move beyond Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque.