Re: Poor taste
Rabelais was certainly an important Renaissance example, though there are loads of less-famous ones.
Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World is the classic study of this genre of comedy, the grotesque as a mimesis of the carnivalesque social mode. Since its publication in the mid '60s there have been many exegeses ad critiques, of course - Stallybrass & White's The Politics and Poetics of Transgression is a particularly noteworthy critique of Bakhtin's optimistic view of the radical-political force of mocking an established social order - but it remains an important treatment, and probably the single best critical accompaniment to Gargantua et Pantagruel.
Aristophanes is also a good reference. Other well-known pre-Early-Modern European artists of the grotesque / carnivalesque include Chaucer (e.g. the Miller's Tale) and Apuleius (the Golden Ass). I note the Wikipedia article throws in authors such as Homer and Ovid, but I think that's too broad; the Odyssey and Metamorphoses have monstrous characters but don't mock social conventions or display many other grotesque tropes.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
