Laughter in Ancient Rome (39 page)

The essential point is that the
scholastikos
is someone who is foolish by reason of his learning, who applies the strictest of logic to reach the most ridiculous conclusions, and who represents the reductio ad absurdum (literally) of academic cleverness. False analogy is his most besetting sin, as in this classic case of advice given by an “egghead doctor”: “‘Doctor’ says the patient, ‘whenever I get up from my sleep, for half an hour I feel dizzy, and then I’m all right.’ And the doctor says, ‘Get up half an hour later.’”
²⁶
Yet what gives some of these jokes an added edge is that the
scholastikos
is not simply stupid. Sometimes we end up feeling that his apparent errors are more correct than they seem or point to some more interesting truth. When the rich
scholastikos
refuses to bury his
small
son in front of a
large
crowd, he is absolutely right: the mourners have come only to ingratiate themselves with the father.
²⁷
And when the healthy egghead avoids meeting his doctor in the street, as he feels embarrassed not to have been ill for such a long time, he is both being an idiot and pointing up the oddity of our relationship with a man whose livelihood depends on our misfortune.
²⁸

After the
scholastikos,
two jokes follow on misers, then later in the collection we find a run of fourteen jokes on witty guys, thirteen on grumpy men (
duskoloi
), ten on simpletons, and so on. But second only to the eggheads as the most prominent type figures are the citizens of three particular towns of the Roman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean: Abdera, Sidon, and Kyme. With some sixty entries between them, we read in joke after joke of their hilarious (though occasionally—as with the egghead—
pointed
) idiocy. “A man from Kyme,” for example, “was swimming when it began to rain, so he dived down deep so as not to get wet,” or “A man from Abdera, seeing a eunuch chatting with a woman, asked someone else if it was the eunuch’s wife. When the man observed that a eunuch couldn’t have a wife, he said, ‘It’s his daughter, then.’”
²⁹

Exactly why these particular peoples and places became such focuses of laughter we cannot hope to know, and it is perhaps dangerous to make a simple comparison with the modern ethnic joke (the English cracking gags at the expense of the Irish or the French at the expense of the Belgians, for example
³⁰
). But they do give us another glimpse into the cultural geography of Roman laughter (see pp. 51–52). In fact, in the case of two of the three towns, there are clear snatches of evidence to suggest that the jokes of the
Philogelos
reflect a wider tradition of jocularity—about them or at their expense.

The geographer Strabo, for example, refers to the people of Kyme being “ridiculed for their stupidity”; this was partly, he writes, because three hundred years after the foundation of their town they “gave away” their customs dues and even before that had not used them to the state’s profit—so that people said it had taken them a long time to realize that they were living by the sea.
³¹
Abdera was even more strongly connected with laughing and joking. One obvious focus was the story of Democritus, the famous Abderite philosopher, who would not stop laughing (see pp. 92–94). But the connection went deeper than that. For Martial, the town was a byword for stupidity, while Cicero could use the phrase “It’s Abdera here” to refer to the topsy-turvy folly of senatorial business at Rome.
³²
It was not only the compilers of the
Philogelos
who saw these towns and their dumb inhabitants as good for a laugh.

There are, however, minor but significant differences in the rhetoric of these jokes about Abdera, Kyme, and Sidon that allow us a precious insight into the various sources and joking styles that must lie somewhere behind the
Philogelos.
It is true that most of the jokes turn out to be fairly interchangeable across the collection: although the type characters are quite distinct, the mininarratives and punch lines appear to migrate easily among those different types. A joke about an egghead with stolen property (“A
scholastikos
who had bought some stolen clothes smeared them with pitch so they wouldn’t be recognized”) is repeated more or less verbatim as a joke about a man from Kyme,
³³
and gags on the theme of whether a liter of wine measures the same as a liter of oil or water are found in different variants attached to both eggheads and a
grammatikos
(teacher) from Sidon.
³⁴
But this general interchangeability should not disguise the ways in which the jokes devoted to each of those three places are in some—often overlooked—respects quite distinct.

First, there is a clear contrast between the Abderite and the Sidonian jokes. Abderites almost always appear as just that: “a man from Abdera,” with no further definition. Sidonians are always qualified by a trade, a profession, or some similar description. Whatever the quip (“‘Lend me a knife as far as Smyrna’; ‘I don’t have a knife that stretches that far’”
³⁵
), it is always tied to some “Sidonian fisherman,” “Sidonian centurion,” and so on—or, in the example just quoted, a “Sidonian butcher.” The jokes about the people of Kyme are different again. To be sure, this group includes many that would slip easily into other categories or are even almost exact doublets of others in the wider collection. But there are a number that stick out from the general run: they are specifically concerned with the dysfunctional political community of the town or with its political institutions and magistrates—in a way, strikingly reminiscent of Strabo’s quip about the harbor dues. So, for example: “When the people of Kyme were fortifying their town, one of the citizens, called Lollianus, built two parts of the defenses at his own expense. When the enemy were threatening, the Kymeans, angry [at Lollianus’ actions], agreed that no one but Lollianus should stand guard over his stretch of wall.” That is to say, in their resentment at the intrusion of individual patronage into their community relations, the Kymeans respond with a literal-mindedness that is bound to be self-destructive: if he built it on his own, he can defend it on his own!
³⁶

What explains these differences in style? Presumably, behind the collection of gags that we now have (or have reconstructed) there lay earlier traditions and smaller-scale compilations, with their own subtly different themes, clichés, and idioms of joking, creating their own comic expectations.
³⁷
A “Sidonian joke” would not be complete without a trade or profession. If a joke about Kyme was promised, you would already half-expect to be laughing at political folly. Tiny example as this is, it offers a rare glimpse into the implicit rules of ancient joking—into what might make an ancient joke sound right.
³⁸

Of course, whether any ancient Roman ever did sit down to read or listen to anything resembling our
Philogelos
—to have a chuckle at a dozen jokes about Sidonians, one after another, let alone at more than a hundred
scholastikos
gags end to end—is highly debatable. It all depends on what we think the text, or its ancestors, might have been
for
. The correct answer to that question is almost certainly beyond us (and the use and function might, in any case, have changed over the history and prehistory of our text). But different assumptions about its origin, purpose, and social level lead to very different interpretations and judgments about the collection as a whole, which it is useful to expose.

It could be that all or part of the text we have was some real-life version of those jokebooks that were the tools of the trade of the Roman comic parasite, with their own walk-on part as props in Roman comedy (see pp. 149–50, 202–3). If so, then no one would ever have listened to these jokes in the form in which we read them, one after another. Any such collection would have been used as an aide-mémoire for the jokester, who would have selected from it and embroidered at will. Hence, perhaps, the unadorned, rather telegraphic form of most of the gags (which I have tried to reproduce in my translations): these were bare skeletons of jokes, onto which the live jester was supposed to put the comic flesh.

It is also possible (and perfectly compatible with the idea of a jokester’s handbook) that we have in the
Philogelos
something approaching a popular tradition of laughter, lying partly outside the elite protocols and idioms that have necessarily been the subject of most of my case studies so far. That would fit nicely with the possible reference in the
Suda
to the “barbershop” (if only we could be confident of that interpretation). It would also reflect the wider medieval manuscript tradition, which tends to group versions of our text with popular fable and “light literature.” And it might help explain the prominence of the
scholastikos
among the jokes: a pointed example of the little people making fun of the useless learning of their “betters.”

Yet it would be hard to disprove the entirely contrary idea that, whatever the deeper sources of this text, the form of “our”
Philogelos
owes most not to some bona fide popular tradition (much as we would love that to be the case) but to some late antique academic systematizer. If we leave aside the dubious reference to the “barbershop,” we might equally well be dealing with the work of some study-bound, second-rate clone of Macrobius, who in the academic world of the late empire set himself the task of collecting and classifying what made people laugh. The jokes on
scholastikoi
might then have a more subtle and interesting part to play. It is worth remembering that in modern cultures, jokes about learning tend to come not from those who are unlearned but from countercultural subgroups among the learned (students and dissident radicals or off-duty, partying professors). Maybe it was similar in antiquity too. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that there would have been no one in ancient Rome who loved jokes about eggheads more than the eggheads themselves.
³⁹

Leaving all those possibilities in play (and that is where they must necessarily stay), I want to turn to think more specifically about the character of these 260-something jokes in the
Philogelos
and their underlying themes and preoccupations. In what ways might they have prompted laughter? And if we look beyond the type figures that give our version of the book its formal structure, what are the jokes actually about? For whatever their origins, this is the biggest assemblage of Roman jokes that we have. Are they merely a series of witty pot shots against men with bad breath, eggheads, and the dim denizens of Kyme? Or is the “Laughter lover” pointing us to some bigger issues, concerns, and fault lines in Roman culture?

GETTING THE JOKE

The jokes in the
Philogelos,
though mostly only a few lines long, come in a variety of recognizable styles. Some reflect the themes of fable, stage comedy, or epigram, others the spirit of mime (though we find very little of mime’s bawdiness; this is in general a very clean collection).
⁴⁰
Many of the gags turn on puns and wordplay.
⁴¹
Some work by conjuring up a striking visual image (“A
scholastikos
bought a house and peeking out of its window asked passersby if it suited him”—as if, we must imagine, he was trying on his house like he might have tried on a cloak).
⁴²
One, at least, appears to match the observation of Cicero (see p. 112) that simply inserting some unexpectedly apposite quotation from poetry could be funny (in the
Philogelos
an actor pursued by two women—one with bad breath, the other with dreadful body odor—quotes a line from tragedy that neatly captures his dilemma).
⁴³

A number of them can still raise a laugh, even if they may need a helping hand from modern translations. Most of the English versions of the
scholastikos,
for example—whether “egghead,” “numbskull,” or “absent-minded professor”—are chosen precisely because they are part of the idiom of modern comedy and predispose us to a chuckle. Other jokes now seem decidedly less funny. That must sometimes be because of the almost unbridgeable gap between some of antiquity’s conventions of joking and our own. Crucifixion, for example, does not have a big part in the modern comic repertoire. So the joke in the
Philogelos
about the man from Abdera who saw a runner being crucified and quipped, “He’s no longer running, but flying,” is likely to leave us cold—and uncomfortable.
⁴⁴