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Book Review: Laughter in Ancient Rome
Nov. 26th, 2023 09:18 amMary Beard’s Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up starts out with about four chapters that might be summarized as “Can we really know anything about laughter in ancient Rome?”, and, like, okay, The Ultimate Unknowability of the Past and all that - indeed, the ultimate unknowability of the present! As Beard comments, it can be hard to tell the difference between witty repartee and vicious personal invective even in one’s own culture. Do these two MPs hate each other’s guts, or are they going to be laughing over drinks at the Commons Bar in an hour? Truly who can say.
But also we are sitting here holding a whole entire book about Laughter in Ancient Rome, so can we just get on with it?
Then the book does get on with it, and the chapters about Roman wit and political repartee are fascinating. I was delighted to learn that Cicero had a reputation as the funniest man in Rome, an orator so addicted to getting a laugh that his enemies complained he was little better than a clown. Beard notes that modern commentators often portray Cicero as viciously attacking a fellow politician named Vatinius, but in some of the sources, it seems like Cicero and Vatinius had a Gladstone-and-Disraeli kind of repartee going on.
In the final chapter, Beard tosses caution to the wind and advances a bold thesis: did ancient Romans invent the templates that still shape many modern jokes? She carefully notes that she doesn’t mean ancient Romans invented joking, but rather, the scripted joke as what you might call a genre: we have ancient Roman joke books, and they’re chock full of “man from Abdera” jokes (in which a man from Abdera misunderstands something in an Amelia-Bedelia-ish way; the city has changed, but the punchline hasn’t) and even an early version of “three men walk into a bar” jokes.
I found this fascinating, and I’d love to see some sort of cross-cultural comparison study of the thesis. Did Romans invent Amelia Bedelia jokes, or do they show up independently in lots of different cultures?
This is, as Beard intended, a book that raises as many questions as it answers: good material for thinking with. You’ll be disappointed if you were hoping for much information about tickling, though. Although the subtitle seems to promise plenty of tickling tidbits, we learn that the Romans thought the lips were a particularly ticklish part of the body, and little more.
But also we are sitting here holding a whole entire book about Laughter in Ancient Rome, so can we just get on with it?
Then the book does get on with it, and the chapters about Roman wit and political repartee are fascinating. I was delighted to learn that Cicero had a reputation as the funniest man in Rome, an orator so addicted to getting a laugh that his enemies complained he was little better than a clown. Beard notes that modern commentators often portray Cicero as viciously attacking a fellow politician named Vatinius, but in some of the sources, it seems like Cicero and Vatinius had a Gladstone-and-Disraeli kind of repartee going on.
In the final chapter, Beard tosses caution to the wind and advances a bold thesis: did ancient Romans invent the templates that still shape many modern jokes? She carefully notes that she doesn’t mean ancient Romans invented joking, but rather, the scripted joke as what you might call a genre: we have ancient Roman joke books, and they’re chock full of “man from Abdera” jokes (in which a man from Abdera misunderstands something in an Amelia-Bedelia-ish way; the city has changed, but the punchline hasn’t) and even an early version of “three men walk into a bar” jokes.
I found this fascinating, and I’d love to see some sort of cross-cultural comparison study of the thesis. Did Romans invent Amelia Bedelia jokes, or do they show up independently in lots of different cultures?
This is, as Beard intended, a book that raises as many questions as it answers: good material for thinking with. You’ll be disappointed if you were hoping for much information about tickling, though. Although the subtitle seems to promise plenty of tickling tidbits, we learn that the Romans thought the lips were a particularly ticklish part of the body, and little more.
