Laughter in Ancient Rome (24 page)

The answer to the second question introduces a more subtle point than may at first be apparent. According to Strabo, the “locus . . . et regio” of the laughable lies “in what you might call the dishonorable or ugly.” Whatever his Aristotelian influence may have been, he is suggesting something rather more complicated than the simple notion that people laugh at what is ugly. His precise claim is that “the only or the main objects of laughter are what people say to indicate or point out something dishonorable—in an honorable way.”
⁷¹
In other words, laughter is provoked not by ugliness itself but—at a second-order level—by the wit of the joker who exploits the ugliness to make a joke. In fact, repeatedly in Strabo’s exposition we find the joke and the joker presented as crucial intermediaries—the catalysts, if you like—between the laugher and the object of his laughter.

That is highlighted in a later passage where Strabo explains that he is moved by peevish and rather bad-tempered jokes (
stomachosa et quasi submorosa ridicula
) but not, he adds, when it is an ill-tempered person who tells them. Why not? Because in that case it is not the person’s “wit” (
sal
) but his character (
natura
) that provokes the laughter.
⁷²
Strabo’s point is that laughter arises from the witty representation of the ugly, the dishonorable, or the bad tempered, not from those qualities themselves. Or at least that is how the proper kind of laughter, associated with the cultured elite, arises. In fact, much of the interest throughout this discussion lies in the methods of joking that are inappropriate—even if they reliably produce the heartiest outbursts of laughter.

Cicero is well aware that the subject of laughter—and its causes—is slippery, dependent on context, and resistant to hard-and-fast rules. He makes this point neatly when he has Strabo explain (at the beginning of his attempted classification of wit) that almost all the sources of
ridicula
can also be the source of serious thoughts (
graves sententiae
); the “only difference is that the serious [
gravitas
] derives from honorable and earnest matters, joking from those that are unseemly and, in a way, ugly.”
⁷³
In fact, he goes on, the very same words can sometimes be used both to praise and to ridicule, and he quotes a
ridiculum
of (probably) Gaius Claudius Nero, the consul of 207 BCE, aimed at a dishonest, light-fingered slave, “the only one against whom nothing in my house is locked or hidden away.” In the context of the thief, this would raise a laugh, but, as Strabo insists, exactly the same could be said word for word in praise of an honest slave.
⁷⁴

But slippery as the idea of laughter is, we do find in
On the Orator
some general rules of thumb about what gets a Roman audience laughing most. By and large, verbal wit on its own is not the most effective way of raising a laugh. Double entendres, as Strabo notes twice, are liable to attract praise for their cleverness but not loud laughter: “Other kinds of joking raise bigger laughs.”
⁷⁵
To get more of a laugh, try combining
ambiguum
with a different type of joke. The unexpected (“when we expect one thing and another is said”) is a more powerful prompt to laughter, and indeed can cause the speaker himself to crack up too: “Our own deviation [
error
] even makes us laugh ourselves.” Or as he underlines later, “Our own deviation naturally amuses us. So when we have been deceived, as it were, by our own expectation, we laugh.” This is the closest we ever come in the ancient world (and it is very close indeed) to a developed version of the modern incongruity theory.
⁷⁶

Sadly, however, Strabo’s main example of a combination of wordplay and the unexpected is one of those cases where ancient laughter is more or less lost to us. Drawn from a farce, the joke concerns a man who has apparently taken pity on a condemned debtor whom he sees being led away. “How much is he going down for?” the observer asks (as if he were going to come up with a financial rescue passage himself). “A thousand sesterces” is the reply. Strabo then takes up the tale: “If he had gone on to say [
addidisset
] no more than ‘You can take him away,’ that would have belonged to the type of the laughable depending on the unexpected. But what he actually said was [
quia addidit
] ‘No advance from me [
nihil addo
]—you can take him away.’ So by adding a wordplay [
addito ambiguo
], another type of the laughable, he was in my opinion very witty indeed [
salsissimus
].”
Nihil addo
is probably some kind of play on the vocabulary of the Roman auction (punning on the senses of “I have no more to say” versus “I am not increasing my bid”), but how exactly it marked the man out as “very witty indeed” is not entirely clear. But with the repeated use in Strabo’s account of various forms of the verb
addo,
it is hard to resist the conclusion that there is also some kind of internal joke in the Ciceronian narrative—constructing its description of verbal wit and punning in self-referentially punning terms.
⁷⁷

Puns, wordplay, and verbal quips were not without their risks. If they were obviously worked out beforehand; used indiscriminately, just for the sake of raising a laugh; or generic rather than specific, then they were the stock-in-trade not of the orator but of the
scurra.
They reeked of the commodification of laughter that was (as we shall see in chapter 8) the hallmark of the déclassé jokester. What is more, they could be counterproductive. Strabo tells a cautionary tale of a courtroom joke, making it an object lesson in why one should sometimes refrain from witticisms even when the occasion to make one presented itself. Philippus, so this story went, once asked the permission of the presiding magistrate to interrogate a witness, who happened to be tiny. The president, in a hurry, agreed: “But only if you’re short.” “You won’t complain. It’ll be a tiny interrogation.” This was a laughable thing to say. But it so happened that one of the judges was even shorter, and the laughter became directed against him, so the joke seemed
scurrile.
“Jokes,” Strabo explains, “that can fall on unintended targets, neat as they might be, are by definition those of a
scurra.
”
⁷⁸

Strabo makes it absolutely clear that the most reliable way to raise a good laugh at Rome was not through clever puns, verbal quips, or the apposite quotation of a line of poetry. It was various forms of bodily disruption that best guaranteed a laugh. What is more likely to promote laughter (
ridiculum
) than a clown? he asks. And the clown does this with his face, with mimicry, with his voice, and by the way he uses his whole body. The point is, though, that these vulgar forms of making people laugh are almost entirely off limits for the elite orator: “Funny faces are beneath our dignity. . . . Obscenity is scarcely fitting for a gentleman’s dinner party, let alone the for the Forum.” The only one that gets any kind of hesitant approval is mimicry, provided that it is used “surreptitiously and in passing.”
⁷⁹

In chapter 7 we shall return to the idea that mimicry was one of the central coordinates of Roman laughter (from actors to apes). But it remained on the very boundary of respectable oratorical wit. Some forms of imitation were, of course, highly to be approved: as the character of Antonius emphasizes earlier in the treatise, imitation of model orators was an important element in rhetorical training.
⁸⁰
Other forms may have raised enthusiastic laughter but were in danger of crossing the line.

The marvelous story of Crassus’ mimicry of his posh opponent nicely illustrates the correlation between imitation and levels of laughter (and gives a surprisingly lively picture of the presentational style of some Roman political debate). When he exclaimed, “By your noble birth, by your line-age,” the listeners laughed at his “imitation of [his rival’s] facial expression and accent.” But when he went on, “By your statues,” and extended his arm (presumably to mimic the classic pose of a Roman republican statue of an orator), “we really roared with laughter” (
vehementius risimus
).
⁸¹
Why this even stronger outburst? The logic of Strabo’s account suggests two factors at work: first, the engagement of the body (rather than just the face and mouth), and second, I suspect, the reductio ad absurdum of imitation that is on display here (as Crassus the orator imitates the statue that is itself an imitation of the oratorical pose).

But the problem was that such tactics of laughter—especially if they involved “excessive imitation”—brought the orator uncomfortably close to the mime actor (
mimus
) or the professional mimic (
ethologus
). This comparison is perhaps even more loaded than that with the
scurra.
As a good deal of important recent work has explored, one of the anxieties that surrounded all oratorical performance at Rome centered on the tendentious boundary between the elite orator and the dishonorable actor (legally branded, along with prostitutes and gladiators, as
infamis
).
⁸²
How could you draw a safe line between the powerfully persuasive performance of the expert orator and the equally persuasive, but socially abominated, performance of the
infamis
actor? Could an orator ever entirely escape the insinuation that he had more in common with an actor than he would like to admit? The question of the joking orator presents a more extreme version of that ideological dilemma. For in his capacity to make people laugh, the orator risks confusion not merely with an actor but with that particular vulgar class of actors associated with the laughter-raising mimes.

Mime actors also raised in an acute form one of the other big dilemmas in the culture of laughter at Rome: how could you distinguish the man whose wit prompted laughter from the man who was being laughed at? How could you be confident that the joker was not in fact the butt? We have already seen a version of this problem in the case of “bad-tempered jokes,” when Strabo claimed to approve of those that were the result of wit but not those that were uttered by a “bad-tempered” man—with the implication that the man’s natural character was in that case the butt of the joke. It is even more explicit in the case of the clown, who, Strabo makes clear, with his funny faces and so on, is the object as much as the prompt of the laughter: “He is laughed at” (
ridetur
).
⁸³
Even if in Cicero’s treatise the active sense of
ridiculus
is usually the more prominent, the passive sense (“ridiculous” in our terms) is never far away. The problem for the joking orator is that in raising a laugh, he exposes himself to be laughed
at:
laughter, in other words, risks being an own goal.

HOW AGGRESSIVE IS ROMAN ORATORICAL LAUGHTER?

The anxieties, ambivalences, and dilemmas that are so prominent in this section of
On the Orator
are strikingly different from the picture of an aggressive and relatively carefree use of laughter that has recently been extracted from the invective of Cicero’s speeches. It is true that there are overlaps. Some of the quips that Strabo quotes certainly aim at the physical peculiarities of the orator’s adversary (the unusual short stature of the witness, for example, or a missing eye). They also sometimes exploit the names of a particular opponent (Aulus Sempronius Musca is mocked as a “buzzer,”
musca
being a word for “insect,” and a man called Nobilior is ribbed as “Mobilior,” or “fickle”). But Strabo highlights the dangers of these gibes just as often as their wit or cleverness: he criticizes the joke against Musca, for example, because it was spoken “just to get a laugh” (
risum quaesivit
).
⁸⁴

More generally, Strabo hedges the use of laughter in oratory with a variety of conditions and caveats: it should not be used against really serious criminals or really unfortunate individuals or those held generally in high esteem (in case it rebounds). Occasionally, he even touches on issues of restraint that modern scholarship holds to be entirely absent from the protocols of Roman oratorical laughter in theory or practice. Corbeill, for example, considers Roman attitudes toward ridiculing personal characteristics for which the individual could not be held responsible. The Aristotelian tradition tended to exempt these from attack (it wasn’t, after all, your fault if you were short). By contrast, “the Romans,” Corbeill claims, “treated the condemnation of physical disadvantages quite differently. . . . A Roman located the responsibility for any deformity, regardless of its origin, solely in the person who bore that deformity.”
⁸⁵
But a debate about that very issue underlies one of the bantering exchanges that Strabo quotes. In this story, Crassus was in conflict with a
deformis
(ugly or deformed) opponent, who kept interrupting him. “Let’s hear the pretty boy,” Crassus said. When the laughter that this provoked had passed, his opponent replied, “I couldn’t mold my appearance, but I could mold my talents.” Crassus then retorted, to even stronger laughter, “Let’s hear the eloquent speaker, then” (the joke presumably being that the man was no more eloquent than he was pretty).
⁸⁶
It is true that Crassus wins the exchange, raising a good deal of laughter at his adversary’s expense, but the story clearly shows that the Aristotelian question of personal responsibility was on the Roman agenda.