The major aesthetic qualities of fabliaux have been lauded in most of the critical assessments of the canon. Despite his general distaste for the genre, and his unease with a number of its distinctive characteristics, Joseph Bédier, the first modern critic to submit the total corpus to serious investigation, recognised that fabliaux manifest many admirable qualities, particularly the ability shown by fablëors to organise the often labyrinthine intrigues of their brief narratives with admirable economy and clarity. His views have been echoed by generations of commentators following his critical lead. The fabliaux have been praised particularly for their naturalistic style, and for their interesting portraits.

Characterisation in the fabliaux assumes many different forms. The remanieur of version I of Le Chevalier qui fist parler les Cons amplifies his account with a long description of a pretty young maid-in-waiting, a classic descriptio and effictio that provides the remanieur an opportunity to display his rhetorical skills, and his familiarity with the conventions of a more prestigious literary tradition than that to which he has devoted his own talents. But the description is quite extraneous to the plot of this fabliau, and its subject without any significant actantial role in the narrative.

There are instances in certain fabliaux where a fictional character creates a false but persuasively credible identity for himself as part of a planned deception, a coup de théâtre involving more than an assumed disguise.