Laughter in Ancient Rome (25 page)

So how should we reconcile the picture of aggressive Roman laughter drawn from Cicero’s speeches with the more theoretical discussion in
On the Orator
? Some people, no doubt, would argue that we should not try too hard. Theory and practice can diverge, even constructively (just as Cicero’s philosophical views on theology are often taken to be quite separate from his day-to-day practice as a Roman priest
⁸⁷
). Maybe this attempt at theorizing really was an almost independent exercise, in dialogue more with earlier traditions of Greek theorizing than with his own oratorical practice. But that approach would signally fail to take into account the strong emphasis that Cicero places throughout
On the Orator
on the specific inheritance and traditions of
Roman
oratory.

A quite different suggestion sees the apparent divergence between the treatise and the speeches from the point of view of Cicero’s image and reputation. If one of the criticisms leveled against Cicero was that he never knew when to stop joking and raising laughter, that he was a
scurra
of a consul, then maybe this discussion of the role of laughter in oratory is a loaded and self-serving defense against those charges; perhaps he chose for that reason to put the section so centrally in the whole work.
⁸⁸
There may be something in this view. Certainly in reading Cicero’s remarks about the importance of keeping a firm boundary between the jokes of the orator and the jokes of the
scurra,
it is important not to forget that this was a boundary that he himself was often accused of transgressing. Yet there is no direct evidence at all that this long section of his essay was a response to personal criticism or an exercise in self-justification and defense, or that it was seen as such.

To turn this on its head, there is a strong argument for letting the protocols for laughter laid out in
On the Orator
nuance our view of the role and significance of the “aggressive humor” in the speeches and encourage us to see some of it as more playful than we usually assume. Some of the laughter and joking in oratory no doubt did work just as Corbeill and others have suggested. After all, even if we were to take the rules enshrined in
On the Orator
very seriously, there are no oratorical rules that are not sometimes broken (else what would be the point of the rules?). But more of the laughter than we imagine might fit the pattern that Strabo’s principles suggest: that is, it was designed not only to “shatter” an opponent but to bring goodwill or to relieve the austerity of a speech and directed not at really outrageous crimes or wickedness but at relatively minor faults.

Cicero’s gibes at Vatinius are instructive here. They have been taken as some of the most extreme examples of assassination by jest. As we have seen (above, p. 106), Cicero repeatedly ridiculed Vatinius’ apparently disgusting appearance (in particular his facial swellings), which he made stand for Vatinius’ “despicable nature” and exclusion from the communal values and good sense of the laughing crowd. Of course, we have no idea what Vatinius really looked like or how unsightly his
strumae
were (and neither did those later Roman writers who commented on them); it would certainly make a difference to how we judged the repartee to know whether the target was a gross disfigurement or just a slightly puffy face and a few warts. But it is worth noting that some ancient views presented the pattern of joking at Vatinius’ expense in rather different terms from those of modern critics. Seneca, for example, refers to the way that Vatinius deflected the gibes by joking about his own appearance,
⁸⁹
and some of the bons mots that Quintilian and (especially) Macrobius collected imply a relationship of much more jocular bantering between Cicero and Vatinius. On one occasion, Macrobius explains, Vatinius was ill and complained that Cicero had not been to visit him. “I wanted to come when you were consul,” Cicero quipped, “but nightfall caught up with me” (one of a series of jokes about the ludicrously short terms of office of consuls under Julius Caesar). Macrobius goes on to say that Cicero was getting his revenge here, because when he had returned from exile, “brought back, he boasted, on the shoulders of the state,” Vatinius had retorted, “So where did your varicose veins come from, then?”
⁹⁰

The point is that it is very hard to calibrate from the outside the aggression that comes with joking and banter, as many modern observers of the British House of Commons find—amazed to see that those who have insulted each other bitterly are, two hours later, sharing a drink in the Commons Bar. We should not assume that Cicero’s jesting “invective” was always an aggressive weapon of social and political exclusion; it might also have been an interactive idiom shared between the orator and his apparent victim.
⁹¹

QUINTILIAN’S ADVICE TO THE JOKING ORATOR

Some 150 years after Cicero wrote
On the Orator,
Quintilian composed his twelve-volume
Handbook on Oratory.
In the middle of the sixth book—much of which is devoted to how the orator might appeal to the audience’s emotions (and which opens with an extraordinary account of the death of Quintilian’s wife and two sons)—is a long chapter on laughter, almost as long as Strabo’s diversion in Cicero’s treatise. It is here that we find his comparison between Cicero and Demosthenes (see above, p. 103), his sound bite on
risus
being not far from
derisus
(p. 28), and his struggles to come up with a working definition of the word
salsum
(p. 115).
⁹²

Predictably enough, Cicero was one of Quintilian’s major sources,
⁹³
and there are many overlaps between the two accounts: Quintilian, for example, shares the division of wit into the categories of
dicto
(
verbo
in Quintilian) and
re,
warns against face pulling as an acceptable means of producing laughter for the elite orator, and advises his readers not to frame jokes against whole classes of people.
⁹⁴
He even includes some of the same examples of jokes and quips as Cicero—though his gift for telling them certainly does not equal his model’s. He rather mangles the joke about the thieving slave (“Nero said about a dreadful slave that there was no one in the house more trusted, as nothing was hidden away or locked”).
⁹⁵
And he seems to have missed the point of one of the better bons mots in
On the Orator.
As an example of a joke by overstatement, Strabo quotes Crassus’ gibe about Gaius Memmius, the tribune of 111 BCE: “He fancies himself so exalted that when he is coming into the Forum, he ducks his head to pass under the Arch of Fabius.” This turns up in Quintilian as “Cicero’s remark about the very tall man: he hit his head on the Arch of Fabius.”
⁹⁶

But there are significant differences too. For a start, Quintilian includes a much wider range of witty sayings than the dramatic date of
On the Orator
made possible: Cicero was restricted to jokes uttered before 91 BCE; Quintilian could cite quips from famous jokesters of later periods, including Cicero himself and the emperor Augustus. But Quintilian also drew on other discussions of laughter and related topics, including a book on “urbanity” by Domitius Marsus, to which he devotes a critical appendix (arguing, among other things, that Marsus’ definition of
urbanitas
was too general),
⁹⁷
and he structured his discussion under different headings, with different emphases, sometimes raising significantly different topics and anxieties, major and minor.

Quintilian makes a great deal of, for example, the analogy between wit and cookery. Cicero had hinted at this in
On the Orator:
Strabo at one point remarks that the things he is discussing amount to “seasoning” (
condimenta
) for day-to-day talk or legal cases. But Quintilian develops this into an extended analogy, linking laughter and food in a way that is an important theme in other writers (see below, pp. 148–51). Pinpointing the root of the word, he writes of
salsum
as “a simple seasoning of a speech, which is sensed by some unconscious judgment, rather like the palate. . . . For just as salt when it is sprinkled generously over food, though not in excess, brings a pleasure all of its own, so witticisms [
sales
] in speaking have something about them that gives us a thirst for listening.”
⁹⁸
He also puts even more emphasis than Cicero had on the gentle character of oratorical wit. “Let us never want to hurt anyone [with our joking],” he insists, “and let’s have nothing to do with the idea that it is better to lose a friend than a jest.”
⁹⁹
We might be seeing here a chronological shift in oratorical style (from the gloves-off style of the Republic to the slightly insipid decorum of the Principate
¹⁰⁰
), but honestly, two isolated discussions are not a strong enough foundation for any such argument.

Quintilian also introduces some striking observations not found in
On the Orator.
He claims, for example, that another characteristic of the
scurra
is that he makes jokes against himself (“one does not approve of that in an orator”).
¹⁰¹
And he suggests that some words prompt laughter in and of themselves. “The word
stomach
[
stomachus
] has something funny about it,” and so does the word
satagere
(“bustle about” or even, in the context, “overact”).
¹⁰²
But there are two major anxieties about the use of laughter that bulk even larger in Quintilian’s discussion than in Cicero’s: the first is the potential for laughter to rebound on the joker, and the second is that prompts to laughter are very often untrue.

Strabo’s presentation revealed lurking worries that the orator might become, like the clown, the object of the laughter he provokes. This comes to the foreground in Quintilian’s
Handbook,
which stresses on several occasions the dangerously ambiguous nature of the laughter process. Referring, for example, to Cicero’s claim that laughter has its foundation “in what you might call the ugly or dishonorable,” he raises the possibility that pointing the finger at such things might rebound: “When these features are pointed out in others, that’s called
urbanitas;
when they rebound [
reccidunt
] on the speaker, that’s called foolishness [
stultitia
].” There are even those, he observes later, who do not avoid jokes that rebound on themselves (
in ipsos reccidere
), and he proceeds to tell the story of a particularly ugly orator who made himself vulnerable by taking a sideswipe at the appearance of someone else.
¹⁰³

Quintilian also plays even more explicitly than Cicero with the different sides, active and passive, of the word
ridiculus,
with the implication that the man who raises a laugh risks becoming (in our, passive, sense) ridiculous. The starkest example is found earlier in the book, before the section dedicated to the use of laughter. Discussing the epilogues of speeches (which might sometime include wit), Quintilian as often includes a description of what to avoid. On one occasion, he explains, the prosecutor was waving in court the bloody sword with which he claimed the victim had been murdered. The other advocate pretended to be scared and hid; when he was called on to speak, he peeped out—his head still partly covered up—and asked if the man with the sword had gone. “Fecit enim risum sed ridiculus fuit” (he raised a laugh but was ridiculous).
¹⁰⁴
Cicero might well have compared the performance to that of a mime actor.

Quintilian’s concerns about truth and falsehood take us further from Cicero’s themes. Cicero in fact was generally unperturbed by the lying and deception that joking could involve—as we can see in another joke about Memmius, the tribune of 111 BCE, that Strabo recounts. Crassus, he explains, once claimed in a speech that Memmius had been involved in a brawl over a girl with someone called Largus and had bitten a large chunk out of the man’s arm. Not just that, but all over the town of Tarracina, where the brawl took place, the letters
LLLMM
started to appear—which Crassus claimed stood for “Lacerat Lacertum Largi Mordax Memmius” (or, as the Loeb translation nicely renders it, “Mordacious Memmius lacerates Largus’ limb”). It raised a good laugh—and every word of it was made up. For Cicero, that was a fine jest, appropriate for an orator, whether it was broadly true with just a sprinkling of “fiblets” (
mendaciunculis
) or a total fabrication.
¹⁰⁵