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Recent studies on ecclesiastical censorship in early modern Italy have contributed to a better understanding of the religious and cultural evolutions of the peninsula during the Catholic Reformation. The historiography has mainly focused on religious publications and successful literary genres such as collections of comic novels ( novellistica). This article deals with another editorial genre that has never been studied from this perspective: collections of jokes and witticisms ( facezie e motti). From the 1550s onwards, the Inquisition adopted a repressive policy due to the repression of Protestant heresy, anxious feelings about the proliferation of texts in the vernacular, and a hostile attitude toward works of fiction. This resulted in jestbook titles being put on several lists of banned books between the 1550s and the 1590s, as well as other censorial measures: the control of bookstores, book confiscations and destructions, and the repression of illegal readings. However, archival documentation—lacunary as it is—seems to indicate that this preventive and repressive censorship was relatively moderate in the peninsula. When we look at the editorial history of some jestbook titles, it is obvious that other forms of censorship (rewriting, self-censorship, bowdlerizing) had a deeper and more lasting effect on the reception of humor in early modern Italy. This article develops the example of the Motti e facezie del Piovano Arlotto and states that the editorial survival of the book was made possible by a series of expurgations that greatly toned down its contents. Within a few decades, all the jokes that were considered improper to “pious ears,” obscene, contrary to good manners ( contra bonos mores), or disrespectful of the dignity of clergy, Catholic ceremonies, or the Scriptures, disappeared from the Italian literature. The historian Peter Burke’s statement about the “disintegration” of Renaissance comic culture under a “cultural offensive” led by the Catholic Church between 1550 and 1650 is probably a bit excessive. However, the Roman authorities were increasingly harsh in their discourse and censorial practices when it came to jestbooks, resulting in changes in what Burke calls the “frontiers of the comic.” The “anticlerical Renaissance” (Ottavia Niccoli) that was well alive until the mid-sixteenth century slowly died afterwards. In the wake of the Tridentine Reformation, the Church started to dictate the religious and cultural norms in the peninsula. The ideological function of humor changed at the same time: in the mid-sixteenth century, it was still a medium for criticizing the Roman Catholic Church; one century later, it had become an element of religious and cultural conformity, even a means of acculturating the laymen to the moral and disciplinary principles of the Catholic Reformation.