Book Review: Laughter in Ancient Rome

[osprey_archer]

Mary 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.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Ancient Chinese texts have these too. When I was doing classical Japanese in grad school, we had to do a semester reading ancient Chinese texts (I very vividly remember reading from the chronicles about the founder of the Han Dynasty), and included in our reading were man-of-Song jokes, basically dumb-ethnicity jokes. The man of Song is always doing things the equivalent of planting boiled potatoes to save himself the labor of cooking them. (I'll see if Wakanomori remembers any of the actual ones and get back to you.)

[osprey_archer]

I love this. Is it simply a Thing That People Do to pick out this one place that the Amelia Bedelias come from and tell jokes about them? It's so bizarrely specific!

[asakiyume]

Okay, Waka reminded me. The story we read went like this: there's a farmer in Song, and he's plowing his field, and a rabbit comes running by and runs straight into a tree and dies from hitting the tree--the farmer gets a rabbit stew!. So the next day the farmer sits down and watches the tree all day, hoping and expecting another rabbit to do the same thing.

.... I'm thinking that the rabbits in Song are as foolish as the farmers. What kind of rabbit runs headlong into a tree?!

[osprey_archer]

Perhaps there is simply something in the water of Song!

[ethelmay]

Reminded of the Turkish stories about the Khoja (some of which I ran across in Juliana Horatia Ewing's Miscellanea).

[asakiyume]

I think my mom read some Khoja stories!