Laughter in Ancient Rome (34 page)

For the ape, as has already been stated, being an animal laughable [
geloios
] in its soul and an inferior [
pros to cheiron
] imitator,
⁴⁴
nature has clad in a body to correspond. In fact, the whole framework of the bones in its legs is put together in such a way that it cannot stand up nice and erect, and it has muscles in the back of its legs that are utterly laughable [
geloiotatous
] and incompatible with its structure. It is for this reason that it cannot stand safely and perfectly erect. But just like a human being stands and walks and runs with a limp when he is raising a laugh [
gelōtopoiōn
] and mocking [
skōptōn
] another of the species who is lame, that’s just how an ape uses its legs.
⁴⁵

There are all kinds of problems with this discussion, enterprising as it is. Galen moves rather too effortlessly among different versions of imitation: from the simplest sense of “likeness” through active “imitation” to an artist’s “caricature.” But he makes a radical (in ancient terms) attempt to explain why the ape’s mimetic properties make it so laughable. In Galen’s view, while the creature may ape the human (to pick up for a moment on our own language of monkey mimetics) and seem very like the human in particular respects, it never fully crosses the boundary that divides it from our species, and that’s what makes us laugh.

It is, however, all the more significant a discussion because Galen draws a parallel between the laughter caused by monkeys and apes and that caused by various human “laughter makers.” This is one of a tiny number of ancient attempts explicitly to reflect on how some visual images can make people laugh.
⁴⁶
In the last passage I quoted, Galen links the naturally awkward movements of the monkey with the mimetic, histrionic movements of the man who raises a laugh by mocking the lame—as if, to reverse the question, the laughable nature of the ape could help to explain why we laugh at the human mimic or clown. To push this a little further than Galen does, he comes close to seeing not just the monkey as a jester but the jester as a monkey. This is, in a way, another variant on the idea that the monkey is laughable “by nature but a man only by practice.”

These monkey themes set the scene for the rest of this chapter, which looks next at human mimes and mimics and closes with Apuleius’ version of crossing species boundaries. In between, I return to the example of Anacharsis, who spent most of the party
agelastos
(unlaughing), and to the question of what could get a nonlaugher to laugh—which involves similar issues of mimicry and the dividing line between animals and humans.

MIME, MIMICRY, AND MIMESIS

Monkeys stood better than any other creature for the connection between mimicry and laughter. But they were not the only mimics in the Roman world to signal laughter. Hovering over the Roman orator as he was tempted to raise a laugh with a wicked impersonation of his opponent was the specter of the Roman mime and its actors. There was at Rome an ambivalent relationship between the practice of oratory and the practice of the stage in general: orators could, and did, learn tricks of the trade from skilled actors, but nonetheless actors were definitely at the other end of the social, political, and cultural hierarchy from Cicero and his like; according to the axioms of Roman power, which partly correlated status with the ownership of one’s own words, an actor was condemned to be only a mouthpiece of the scripts of others.
⁴⁷
There was no such ambivalence about mime. The mime actor (
mimus
), like the
scurra,
was a dreadful antitype of the elite orator. Mime was the one ancient theatrical genre most firmly associated with laughter, but to suggest that in raising a laugh a Roman orator was playing his part in a Roman mime amounted to an insinuation that he was quite beyond the pale. So why were mimes so laughable—and so unacceptable? What was their role in the “laughterhood” of Rome?

Mime is a contested genre in modern scholarship. We know much less about Roman mimes than we would like to. We tend to speculate with misplaced confidence on what we don’t know—while sometimes overlooking some of the obvious things we do. There is general agreement that whatever its debt to an earlier Greek tradition, mime was a particularly important medium in Rome, influencing all kinds of literary production, from Horace through Latin love elegy to Petronius (“the missing link in Roman literary history,” as Elaine Fantham once dubbed it).
⁴⁸
There is agreement too that mime was one of the few ancient theatrical genres that featured women as performers, and both male and female actors had speaking parts—this was not mime in our (silent) sense of the term.
⁴⁹
After that, things become murkier.

It is sometimes assumed that there was a fairly clear distinction between mime and “pantomime”—a performance (again quite unlike the modern genre of the same name) normally consisting of silent dancers accompanied by singers. But in practice, ancient writers blurred the distinction; like the learned diners in Macrobius’
Saturnalia,
they slipped easily between talk of mime and talk of pantomime (see pp. 78–79).
⁵⁰
It is also commonly said that, in sharp contrast to performers in other major theatrical genres of antiquity, mime actors performed without masks. That may be so, but it is a claim that rests largely on one passage of Cicero’s
On the Orator
—where the character of Strabo asks, “What could be more
ridiculus
than a
sannio
? But he produces laughter [
ridetur
, “is laughed at”] with his face, his expression, his voice, in fact with his whole body. I can say that this is funny [
salsum
] yet not in a way that I would want an orator to be, but like a mime actor.”
⁵¹

The modern interpretation rests on the idea that if the face is a prompt to laughter, the character concerned cannot have been wearing a mask (for that would have hidden the face). But this passage does not say that. It refers to the face and expression of some kind of clown (
sannio
) and compares his general style of laughter production with that of a mime actor.
⁵²
In any case, a funny expression might actually be the expression of a mask—especially as we have a strong hint in Tertullian of a tradition of masked mime (“The image of your god covers his foul and notorious head,” he writes of what seems very likely to be a mime actor).
⁵³
Perhaps we are seeking uniformity where none is to be found.

For the rest, there is a wide range of conflicting and incompatible testimony on the nature of Roman mime, onto which it is hard to impose much convincing order. Roman writers sometimes strongly associate mimes with low life, suggesting that performances took place in front of common crowds on the street, but other times they refer to mimes put on in the residences of the elite and in front of some very upmarket fans of the genre.
⁵⁴
They sometimes imply that mimes were improvised, off-the-cuff performances, though our knowledge of mime comes mostly from what survives of crafted literary versions, including those written by the well-to-do (so it is said) Laberius, who was notoriously asked by Julius Caesar to act in one of his own mimes (insult or flattery?).
⁵⁵
Sometimes our sources suggest that the plots were drawn from everyday life and were by and large bawdy to boot; that is certainly what the genteel characters of the
Saturnalia
assumed (see p. 78), and plenty of the surviving fragments on papyrus focus on adultery stories, farts, and the “lower bodily stratum” in its limited varieties.
⁵⁶
But other mime plots were clearly mythological, even if they ended up as lusty parodies rather than straight renderings (such as Laberius’
Anna Peranna
or the versions of Virgil’s
Eclogues
performed by wellknown mime stars).
⁵⁷

It is not hard to see why some scholars have rather desperately resorted to constructing a chronological development (whether a shift in the character and audience of the mimes from popular to elite culture, or alternatively an ever-increasing scale of bawdiness—“lewder as time went on,” as one critic recently put it
⁵⁸
). Nor is it hard to see why others have suggested that mime was something of a catchall category that embraced “any kind of theatrical spectacle that did not belong to masked tragic and comic drama.”
⁵⁹
The idea that the ancient
mime
could be as loose a term as the modern
farce
is an attractive one, and it conveniently accommodates the otherwise awkwardly conflicting evidence. But even so, it tends to sidestep (or not take seriously enough) those two things that we know for sure about mime: its whole point was to make people laugh, and it was a strikingly imitative genre.

There can be no doubt that mime and laughter went together, and for that reason alone, mime deserves its share of the limelight in this book. Where we have met it in earlier chapters, it has always been as a laughter raiser (for better or worse, vulgar or not). This connection can be documented time and again. It is emphasized, for example, in some of the memorial verses composed to commemorate notable actors or authors in the genre. Philistion, an early imperial mime writer, is written up in a verse that proclaims how “he made the mournful lives of men to mix with laughter.” A similar message is conveyed in the memorial to the mime actor Vitalis, who is said to have “unleashed laughter in sad hearts.”
⁶⁰
And as late as the sixth century CE, the Sophist Choricius of Gaza defends the power of mimes against Christian critics of the genre by praising their restorative and laughter-provoking power and—interestingly, taking another view of laughter’s role on the species boundary—argues that laughter was in fact a property shared by humans and the gods.
⁶¹

Why, then, was mime so powerful a producer of laughter? Again, the reason that any individual laughed at any individual performance is lost to us; answers might range from some carnivalesque pleasure in bums and farts to the simple fact that everyone else in the audience was splitting their sides. But in the discussions of mimes in our elite authors, the key factor links laughter and—as the very name suggests—the imitative nature of the genre. This went far beyond the more general (and philosophically controversial) questions of mimesis that underlay all theatrical representation; the hilarity of the mime was linked to its specific practices of mimicry.
⁶²

It remains debatable how far ancient actors in the major theatrical genres of tragedy and comedy “acted” in our terms. There are some hints that, as time went on, various forms of impersonation gradually became more important in mainstream ancient drama, with greater stress on, for example, realistic characterization of language and accent—even from behind a stylized mask.
⁶³
All the same, imitation of this kind was never taken to be a defining feature of the tragic or comic theater as it was of the various performance traditions that go under the heading of
mime.
Cicero and Quintilian both point to the aggressive mimicry of this genre. The anecdote about the (panto)mimes in Macrobius also centers on the realistic imitation of the mad Hercules, although the audience misread it (see p. 79).
⁶⁴
And those ancient scholars who attempted to define the essence of mime (for modern scholars are not the first to try to impose order on the tricky complexities of classical culture) repeatedly emphasized its imitative qualities. For example, Diomedes, a fourth-century grammarian, writes of its “imitation of different forms of speech,” its “bawdy imitation of lewd words and deeds,” and how it was named for its mimetic properties (“as if it were the only genre that used imitation, although other forms of literature [
poemata
] do likewise, but it alone, as if by some particular prerogative, claimed rights over what was common property”); along similar lines and at roughly the same date, Evanthius refers to mime’s “everyday imitation of common things and trivial people.”
⁶⁵

We cannot write this off merely as a grammarians’ solution, resorting to etymology (“mimes are mimetic”) as a convenient means of explanation. For Cicero, Quintilian, and Macrobius insist that the mime actors’ mimicry was instrumental in the production of laughter. The audience laughed at the imitation and pretense of these actors, which was not far from saying—by easy shorthand and slippage—that the audience laughed
at
the actors themselves (if they didn’t, the mime would fail). It was this aspect, as much as the whiff of low life, that determined the orator’s fear of being mistaken for a
mimus.
That would mean he had failed the challenge confronting the elite public speaker: how to provoke laughter (as a
ridiculus
) without simultaneously becoming its butt (
ridiculus
in the other sense).