Laughter in Ancient Rome (40 page)

Scholarly ingenuity and expertise can sometimes rescue others or at least provide some excuse for the apparent lack of any funny point. The various editors of the Greek text of the
Philogelos
have on occasion blamed sloppy medieval copyists for missing out the punch line. So, for example, Roger Dawe, when confronted with a joke that simply reads, “An egghead, wanting to catch a mouse that was all the time gnawing at his books, sat down in the dark crunching meat . . . ,” decided that someone, in the process of transmission, must have failed to finish the gag (for surely it was better than that).
⁴⁵
Other critics have scoured the texts to unearth hidden puns in an attempt to recover the funny points we have missed (much like Fontaine’s project with Plautus; see p. 56).

A typical example is the very first joke in the modern collection: “An egghead asked a silversmith to make a lamp. When the smith asked how big he should make it, the egghead replied, ‘For eight people.’”
⁴⁶
Maybe it is a good enough gag as it stands: the
scholastikos
confuses the conventions of measurement, for lamps are not sold according to the number of people they will illuminate (even though, from another perspective, that might not be such a bad way of doing it). But a clever recent study, convinced that on that standard interpretation it must be “one of the least funny items in this . . . book,” has claimed that we have simply missed the puns. The Greek word for “lamp” (
luknos
) is also the word for a fish, and
poieō
(make) is very occasionally attested in the sense of “prepare” (as in food or cooking). So maybe this is really a smart wordplay on lamps and fishes, on making and cooking. “How big do you want the lamp/fish?” Enough for eight.
⁴⁷

Or maybe not.
⁴⁸
Satisfying as this—and other ingenious modern reconstructions of these jokes
⁴⁹
—may be, we have to beware of that old pitfall of pouring too much energy into making them funny for us. In fact, it would be a fair assumption that some of the jokes in this collection were feeble anyway and not likely to raise a laugh even among an ancient audience. It is not merely that jokebooks, to fill their pages, tend to include bad jokes alongside the good, for the sad truth is that there are never quite as many sparkling ones as you need. It is also, more fundamentally, that the cultural coordinates of joking make bad and good jokes symbiotic and inseparable. We need the bad jokes to appreciate the good; they provide the necessary chorus line behind those that really will make us chuckle.

Among this chorus line in the
Philogelos
I would count one rather flat little story of a “simpleton” apprentice (presumably to a barber–cum–nail cutter). “A simpleton apprentice, told by his master to cut a gentleman’s nails, started to weep. When the client asked why, he said, ‘I’m scared, that’s why I’m crying. For I’m going to hurt you, and you’ll get sore fingers, and the master will beat me.’”
⁵⁰
Likewise an even shorter tale of a “meanie” in the fuller’s workshop: “A meanie went into a fullery and, not wanting to pee, died.”
⁵¹
There must be some connection here with the use of urine in the fulling and laundry industry in Rome. Possibly (and this is the best explanation I can offer) the mean man was so keen not to give his valuable urine to the fuller for free that he retained it until his bladder burst and he died.
⁵²

Of course, some of these may have raised more laughs in the telling than they do on the page. Suppose that the jokes as recorded in the
Philogelos
were always intended as telegraphic summaries, to be embroidered and given comic color by the jester; then any performance might have added the kind of circumstantial detail that the bare one-liner of the meanie in the fullery seems desperately to need. (What exactly detained him, for example? Why didn’t he just leave the fullery to have a pee?) We can only guess at the relationship between the text and the telling. But in general, I have little doubt that we go against the grain of this or any such collection if we demand that all its jokes be
good
jokes—whether by ancient or modern standards.

VIEWING THE WORLD AWRY

Good or not, jokes have plenty to tell us about Roman culture. Whether they prompted loud chortles, modest sniggers, or blank bemusement, they offer a sideways glance into ancient puzzles, problems, and debates that can otherwise remain hidden from us.

It is almost a truism (and one that I have exploited in this book) that laughter is a marker of areas of disruption and anxiety, whether social, cultural, or psychic. We have seen, for example, how Roman laughter negotiated the contested boundaries of power and status—between animals and humans, emperors and subjects. And the simple calculation that roughly 15 percent of the jokes in the
Philogelos
in some way concern death (from coffins to suicide or inheritance
⁵³
) is probably enough to encourage some amateur Freudian theorizing in us all.

In thinking more widely, however, about the cultural implications of the jokes in the
Philogelos,
I have again found Simon Critchley’s discussion of joking and laughter particularly helpful. For Critchley, jokes and (in his terms) “humour” operate in part as distancing devices, inviting us to view the world awry. Jokes are appealing because they help us to see our lives and assumptions “as if we had just landed from another planet” and to “relativize the categories” that we usually take for granted. “The comedian is the anthropologist of our humdrum everyday lives” and turns those of us who see the point of the joke—those who
get
it—into domestic anthropologists too. In the process of laughing, we are not only freed from “common sense”; we also recognize the misrepresentations, shortcuts, and occlusions that common sense rests on. For Critchley, in other words, jokes are as much heuristic, intellectual devices as windows into the wellsprings of our unconscious.
⁵⁴

We have already seen some aspects of this domestic anthropology. When we laughed at the
scholastikos
dodging his doctor because he had not been ill for a long time (pp. 190–91), we were at the same time recognizing the strangeness of our relationship with a man whose prosperity depends on our sickness. Likewise there are a number of jokes in the
Philogelos
that focus on the peculiar status of dreams and their relationship to waking reality. For example, “Someone met a
scholastikos
and said, ‘My learned sir, I saw you in a dream.’ ‘Good god,’ he replied, ‘I was so busy I didn’t notice you’” (or, in a slightly different variant, “‘You’re lying,’ he said. ‘I was in the country’”).
⁵⁵
Another egghead “dreamed that he trod on a nail and so bandaged his foot. An egghead friend asked the reason and, when he learned, said, ‘We deserve to be called idiots. Why on earth did you go to bed without your shoes on?’” Much the same point is made in the joke about the cowardly hunter who dreamed he was chased by a bear, so bought some hounds and had them sleep next to him.
⁵⁶

Of course, many Romans would have had a more pressing interest in their dreams than modern dreamers have, seeing them as much more directly prophetic or diagnostic than any recent psychoanalytic theory would allow.
⁵⁷
It is perhaps for that reason that the questions posed in these jokes turn out to be more acute than their simple comic form might suggest. There is more under the spotlight here than the general relationship between dream life and the waking world. Readers or audience are being prompted to reflect on the relative temporalities of dreams and everyday life, on the relationship between the dreamer and the other people who appear in the dream (what effect does our dreaming about someone else have on them?), and on the ability of the waking world to impact on the sleeping (can we be so sure that the hounds by the bedside will not keep the dream bears off?). In Critchley’s terms, these gags—“like small anthropological essays”—acted to estrange ancient readers or listeners from their unreflective, commonsense assumptions on the nature of dreaming. The reward for the laugher would be the pleasure of reflecting differently on the problems of the dreamworld and of exploiting the capacity of the joke to expose the nagging puzzles normally hidden or brushed aside. Exactly where, for example, does a dream take place?

Other jokes in the collection, found across the various categories into which it is usually divided, seek to raise a laugh by challenging conventions of Roman social or cultural life that were even more fundamental. A few target the rules of succession, the orthodox ordering of family life, and the taboos that surrounded it. These expose the slippery relativity of the categories “father” and “son.” So, for example, “A
scholastikos
got up one night and into bed with his grandmother. Taking a beating for it from his father, he said, ‘Hey, you—it’s been such a long time that you’ve been screwing my mother without getting a beating from me, are you angry that you found me just once on top of your mother?’”
⁵⁸
The question is: How can rules and prohibitions acknowledge the shifting categories of family relations? In this joke, the consequence of the son resting his case on the law of nature—that everyone’s father is someone else’s son—is sexual mayhem. But in another gag, it is precisely that point that saves the day, as well as a baby’s life. For there the story is that a young
scholastikos
has had a child by a slave, and his father suggests killing it (a fairly typical “solution” to unwanted children in the ancient world). The son’s response? “Put your own children in their graves first, before you talk of getting rid of mine.”
⁵⁹

A rather more unexpected convention held up for particular scrutiny in the
Philogelos
is that of number. We might have predicted that the rules and discontents of family and sexual life would have been obvious targets for a Roman jokester; we would not, I think, have imagined that the conventional symbols of number and their relationship to “real” quantity would have been an even more prominent theme. Yet repeatedly we find jokes pointing to and playing with what we might call numerical tropes. In their simplest form—and for a modern readership, we must admit, it’s not particularly funny—these rest on that old joking standby: the confusion of signifier and signified. So an egghead on a ship that was in danger of sinking, carrying with him a written debt bond for “one and a half million,” decided to lighten its load simply by erasing the five hundred thousand. Whereas the other passengers had thrown their luggage overboard, the
scholastikos
proudly announces that he has reduced the weight of the ship (and, of course, at the same time the burden of his debt) just by rubbing out the
5
.
⁶⁰

Much the same point underlies another, at first sight very different, gag. “A
scholastikos
was going away, and a friend asked him, ‘Please buy me two slave boys, each fifteen years old.’ He replied, ‘OK, and if I can’t find the pair, I’ll buy you one thirty-year-old.’” Though we might be tempted to see sex as the main theme here (and indeed I have heard a few sexist modern jokes weighing up the virtues of two twenty-year-old women against one forty-year-old), the bottom line is surely number and the gap between numerical symbol and bodily reality. To spell it out (beyond an ounce of remaining humor): although two fifteens certainly do make thirty, one thirty-year-old slave is no substitute for two fifteen-year-olds. And with that comes a glimpse of the shifting, unstable conventions of number and counting, for, after all, one two-pound bag of flour would have been as good as two one-pound bags.
⁶¹

Variants on this theme are found throughout the collection, playing space, size, time, and value against the symbols of number in subtly different ways. The subjects of these jokes range from the man from Kyme who broke into the house of a money lender to recover the most expensive IOU (and so took away the heaviest file) to the “Sidonian egghead” with a country estate who—wanting to make it nearer town—simply removed seven of the milestones along the route; from the
scholastikos
who wondered if the ladder had as many rungs going down as going up to the doctor from Kyme who charged half as much for treating a tertian fever (with a three-day recurrence) as a semitertian (with an alternate day recurrence).
⁶²
This is another striking case where the repeated, underlying themes of joking give us an unexpected glimpse into some of the embedded debates, uncertainties, and contestations of the Roman world: here, how arithmetic works and how on earth to understand what a number is.

Those uncertainties notably extend to personal identity. One deceptively simple question—“How do I know who I am?”—leaves its vivid mark on the
Philogelos.
The gag about the
scholastikos,
the bald man, and the barber that launched this chapter revolves around exactly that issue (how do I tell the difference between “me” and “someone else”? Is it just a hair’s breadth?). So do many others, including some of the most memorable in the collection. They repeatedly ask where authority and the rights of authentication in questions of personal identity lie. One short version goes like this: “A
scholastikos
bumped into some friend of his and said, ‘I heard that you had died.’ He replied, ‘But you can see I’m alive.’ And the
scholastikos
came back, ‘But the person who told me was far more trustworthy than you.’”
⁶³