Laughter in Ancient Rome (32 page)

This idea that the emperor’s daughter exploited her legitimate pregnancies (when “the ship’s hold is full”) as an opportunity for sleeping around might be read as an outright attack on Augustus’ moral legislation. Or it might be seen as banter in the risqué style of some of the emperor’s own joking encounters (see p. 131). Either way, its apparently blithe self-confidence is dramatically undercut—for those who know the full story—by the fact that Julia ended up exiled for her adulteries and died a lonely death in the same year as her father.
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One thing that we almost entirely miss in Rome is the tradition of subversive female laughter—what we call giggling—that is a distinctive strand in modern Western culture and can be glimpsed as far back as Geoffrey Chaucer. Although in the first chapter of this book I semiseriously call Dio’s stifled outburst in the Colosseum “giggles,” for us that form of laughter, including its cultural and literary construction, is almost exclusively associated with women and “girls”; in its strongest form, it is, in Angela Carter’s words, “the innocent glee with which women humiliate men.”
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If there was any such well-established, female alternative gelastic tradition in Roman culture, there is little reflection of it in surviving literature.
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Unsurprisingly, perhaps, because despite its significance in women’s popular culture, until recently it was a form of laughter that tended to exist outside the dominant orthodoxy, hardly figuring in male literary or cultural traditions for centuries, except to be ridiculed itself (“giggling schoolgirls”). It is not—as Carter observed of Alison’s outburst at the expense of her cuckolded husband in Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale”—“a sound which is heard very often in literature.”
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For the most part, women’s laughter is carefully policed in the literary representations of the Roman world. It does not seem to represent, as a specifically gendered form, much of a threat to male egos or to male traditions of laughter and joking, or at least the rules and regulations, implicit or explicit, were intended to ensure that it did not. As on so many topics, the reflections of Ovid are notably smart here. For in the third book of the
Art of Love
—his mock instructional poem on how to catch (and keep) a partner—he parodies the norms of female laughter, in the process exposing some of the cultural fault lines in Roman gelastic conventions. He also introduces what will be the main theme of this chapter: the boundary between humans and animals, which laughter helps both to establish and to challenge. It will come as no surprise to readers familiar with the misogynistic structures of ancient thought that the laughter of women leads “naturally” on to the braying and roaring of the animal kingdom.

After two books of advice to young men—on where to hang out to make your catch (races and triumphal processions are hot spots), on being sure to remember her birthday, on playing a little hard to get, and so on—in the third book, the narrator turns to a different group of pupils. Love’s mock (and mocking) “schoolmaster” now proceeds to give instructions to the female of the species. A couple of hundred lines are devoted to the care of the body, the style of the hair, and disguising your less attractive features, but then Ovid changes gear slightly. A warning to women not to laugh if they have unattractive teeth (black, too big, or crooked) launches some more general lessons in laughter. “Who would believe it?” he asks. “Girls even learn how to laugh.”
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Well, believe it or not, he goes on to run through the main points on the syllabus of laughter. “Let the mouth,” he urges, “open only so far. And keep those
lacunae
on each side small.”
Lacuna
usually means “a gap” or “a hole”—but here, and only here in surviving Latin literature, it is presumably being used for what we would call a dimple.
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How a girl could ever control her dimples is, of course, hard to imagine. But there is more complicated advice to come: “They should make sure that the bottom of the lips covers the top of the teeth, and they should not strain their sides by laughing continually but make a nice little feminine sound.”

There is a good deal of characteristic Ovidian wit in this passage. Part of the joke rests on the idea that laughter could ever be the subject of instruction. “You’ll never believe this,” the artful teacher says. And of course we don’t—but we are given the lessons all the same. Some, like the dimple regime, are more or less impossible to carry out. Others are close to incomprehensible. Commentators and translators have struggled for generations to make practical sense of “Et summos dentes ima labella tegant.” “Make sure the bottom of the lips covers the top of the teeth” is certainly one possible way of rendering it; so too is “Make sure the lower lips cover the top teeth.” But what could either possibly mean? “As often” one commentator despairs, “. . . Ovid’s virtuoso technical display reads well, but is hard to pin down.”
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But is that not exactly Ovid’s point? It is laughable to suggest, he is hinting to his readership, that you could ever learn to control the physicality of laughter. You could never follow these spuriously technical instructions; that’s the joke.

Ovid concludes his advice with some warning examples of how a girl might get her laughter wrong, and this takes us almost directly to the animal kingdom. “There’s one kind of girl,” he writes, “who distorts her face with a frightful guffaw; there’s another who you’d think was crying, when she is actually creased with laughing. Then there’s one that makes a harsh noise without any charm—laughing like an ugly donkey brays as she goes round the rough millstone.”
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That comparison between woman and donkey is particularly marked in the original Latin: in a prominent play on words (“ridet / ut rudet”), the girl
ridet
(laughs) like the donkey
rudet
(brays).

That pun points us to one of the great paradoxes of laughter for Roman writers, as for later theorists. On the one hand, laughter could be seen as a defining property of the human species. Yet on the other hand, it was in laughing, in the noise produced and the facial and bodily contortions of the laugher, that human beings most closely resembled animals. The awkward point was, quite simply, that the very attribute that defined the human’s humanity simultaneously made him or her one of the beasts—a braying ass, for example. Or as Simon Critchley summed it up, writing of humor rather than laughter itself, “If humour is human, then it also, curiously, marks the limit of the human.”
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Roman writing often highlights that paradox. In Ovid’s literary lessons in laughter, it is underlined not only by the pun on
ridet
and
rudet.
When, a little earlier, the poet advises the girl that she should “let the mouth open only so far,” the word used for the gap between the lips opened up in laughter is
rictus:
“sint modici rictus.”
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That is a word with two principal referents: the open mouth of the human laugh and the gaping jaws of an animal. And when it refers to a laugh, it almost always suggests a contortion of the face bordering on the bestial. In Lucretius it is the grimace of death, in Suetonius the foaming mouth (
spumante rictu
) of the deformed emperor Claudius.
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But it is Ovid in the
Metamorphoses
who exploits the word most systematically and cleverly. We have already seen (pp. 136–37) how laughter marks the power relations between gods and humans in the poem.
Rictus
is often a marker of the change of status between human and animal, which is one of the poem’s main motifs. When Io, for example, is turned into a heifer, one of the signs of the transformation is that she now has a
rictus
rather than a mouth, and the
rictus
contracts (
contrahitur rictus
) when she changes back into a human.
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Catullus exploits a similar idea when in poem 42 (“Adeste hendecasyllabi”) he focuses on the laughter of a woman who has some drafts of his poetry and refuses to give them back. Addressed to the poet’s verses themselves, it is a complicated poem cast in deceptively simple terms that draw on the traditions of invective, of popular Roman rough justice, and, as has more recently been argued, of Roman comedy.
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It also has a lot say about laughter as such. The girl who has her hands on the writing tablets (a “foul tart,”
putida moecha
) thinks Catullus himself a “joke” (
iocum
), but he turns the tables on her by attacking the laughter as well as the laugher. She laughs, he writes,
moleste ac mimice:
that is, “annoyingly” and, in one literal sense, “in the style of a mime actress”—a word that, as we shall see (p. 171), is more complicated than this translation implies and goes right to the heart of one important aspect of Roman laughter culture. But more than that, she laughs “with the face of a Gallic hound,”
catuli ore Gallicani.
Part of the joke must rest on the obvious pun (
catuli/Catulli
), but the image in general serves to undermine the humanity of the human laugher: the open mouth, distorted face, and no doubt bared teeth turn the woman into a beast.
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In the rest of this chapter I shall explore how laughter impacts on that boundary between humans and animals—highlighting other aspects of the figure of the parasite, now appearing in animal guise, and thinking harder about the roles of both mime and imitation (failed as much as successful) as key prompts to Roman laughter. I will start with “monkeys,” or “apes” (shamelessly lumping all primates together interchangeably under those two popular headings
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), and will highlight one of the notable ancient theories about laughter that these animals prompted. And I shall end with donkeys, or asses—encountering en route some famous agelasts of the Roman world, those notorious characters who were said never, or only very rarely, to have laughed. One important text will be Apuleius’
Metamorphoses,
or, as it is often now known,
The Golden Ass.
For not only does this novel explicitly focus on the boundary between man and donkey (the hero Lucius being accidentally transformed into an ass and finally, thanks to the goddess Isis, back into human form again), but one major episode in its plot is a (spoof) festival of the god Laughter (Risus).

These themes will open up another set of ideological entanglements. In the previous chapter I pointed to the connections between laughter, different forms of political and civic hierarchy, and the
convivium,
or banquet. Here the entanglement is, I should warn you, even more entangled: between laughter and mimicry, mime and the contested frontier that separates the human and animal species. That is part of the point. I want to explore the unexpected cultural connections that are exposed if you follow laughter’s thread. I shall also return to that Janus-faced aspect of Roman laughter: the close links in ancient Rome between those people who make you laugh and those you laugh at.

MONKEY BUSINESS

Monkeys and apes were supposed to make Romans crack up—in a tradition of laughter that stretched back, or so they imagined, to early Greece.
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One of the guests at the dinner party staged in Athenaeus’
The Philosophers’ Banquet
refers to a story about the (semilegendary) sixth-century BCE Syrian sage Anacharsis on just this theme. Anacharsis was once at a party where jesters were brought in, and he remained solemnly unlaughing (
agelastos
). But when a monkey was brought in, then he started to laugh.
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Why were monkeys so funny? And can the laughter that erupted around them help us understand some of the other chuckles and chortles that were said to resound around other parts of Roman culture?

Primates are good to think with. Modern science since Charles Darwin has famously debated the question of whether primates laugh, and if so, whether the physical response we might (or might not) call their “laughter” is significantly different from our own.
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That was not, so far as we know, a concern of Greek and Roman writers, who did not use the behavior of apes to challenge the idea that only humans (plus or minus the occasional heron; see pp. 33–34) laughed. They negotiated the boundary between apes and humans in other ways, concerned not only with the similarities between primates and humans but more particularly with the imitative properties of the primates. Were they very like human beings? Or were they just pretending to be so? And what was the difference? These are questions that have intrigued recent generations too. In fact, some readers of this book (like its author) will be old enough to remember when the highlight of a visit to a zoo was the chimpanzees’ tea party, in which chimps dressed up in silly human clothes sat at a table and were made to consume a human-style tea. It was a powerful prompt to reflect on what divides us from the simians.
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