Laughter in Ancient Rome (43 page)

Erich’s approach was characteristically against the grain. For him, he said, the surprising thing about Roman laughter was not its strangeness. To be sure, it could sometimes seem puzzling, even incomprehensible, in many of the ways that I had pointed out. But no less striking was the simple fact that two thousand years later, in a radically different world, we could still laugh at some of the gags that apparently had made the Romans crack up. Wasn’t the big problem, he asked, the
comprehensibility
of Roman laughter, not the reverse?

We talked on for a while, wondering what might explain our capacity to get the Roman joke, or at least to get some Roman jokes. It would obviously be dangerous to set one’s face entirely against the universals of neuroscience. The prompts to laughter in the human brain may in some ways transcend cultural difference. It would be equally dangerous to be blind to those patterns in world folklore that—however we explain it—throw up very similar themes and story lines in popular tales, fables, and sayings across the globe. In fact, there are traditional Arabic jokes with a striking resemblance to some of those in the
Philogelos.
¹
Yet most of what I had talked about through the lectures suggested that by and large, cultural differences in the practice of laughter trump whatever cultural or biological universals it might be reassuring to fall back on.

Over the five years since that conversation, I have become increasingly convinced that the reason we can laugh along with the ancient Romans is because it is from them that—in part at least—we have learned
how
to laugh and what to laugh
at
. I still think that there is an element of suggestibility in the chuckles that some gags in the
Philogelos
can produce in a modern audience (we laugh because we are determined to, and because it is funny in itself to laugh at jokes that have been around for two millennia—and anyway, they are translated and told with the idiom of modern jokes in mind). But there is more to it than that.

However tentative the claim that the Romans invented the joke must always remain (and, of course, I meant it to some extent as a provocation), one thing is absolutely certain: those wits and scholars from the Renaissance on who helped to define the main contours of European laughter culture with their learned debates and hugely popular collections of jokes and “merry tales” looked directly back to ancient Rome as ancestor and inspiration. Cicero’s
On the Orator
provided them not only with the closest thing they had to a theory of laughter but also with a collection of wisecracks that could be taken over—as they stood or redressed in modern clothing—into their own anthologies of
facetiae,
and there was Macrobius’
Saturnalia
to be raided as well, where the bons mots of Cicero himself could be found.
²
By the eighteenth century, parts of the
Philogelos
were also widely available. In fact, the great Cambridge classicist Richard Porson (1759–1808) is commonly said to have planned to write a scholarly edition of the best-known jokebook of that period,
Joe Miller’s Jests,
in order to show that every single joke in it was descended from the ancient “Laughter lover.” He would have been wrong—but not as wrong as you might think.
³

Of course, there have been all kinds of other influences on modern laughter. It would be ridiculous to claim an unadulterated line of descent from the Roman culture of laughter to our own, and no less ridiculous to imagine a single homogenous culture of modern Western laughter anyway, whether across or within linguistic and ethnic boundaries (the long tradition of Jewish joking is one other tradition among many). And, of course, the raids that our ancestors made on classical joke collections were highly selective. Erudite Renaissance humanists and eighteenth-century jokesters must have found some of what they read in their ancient sources as baffling as we do, sometimes more so; as we’ve already seen (p. 186), Dr. Johnson struggled to get the one about the egghead, the bald man, and the barber. Nonetheless, the jokes that they selected, retold, adapted, and handed down from those Roman models are built into the foundations of our modern idioms of joking, stand-up, and comic one-liners. So it’s hardly surprising that we still laugh at them—or that they should demand (and deserve) the kind of attention I have given to them, and to the wider “laughterhood” of Rome, in the course of this book.

In fact, we still retell Roman jokes almost word for word—knowingly or, more often, unknowingly.

One of the quips attributed to Enoch Powell—a notorious twentieth-century politician, sardonic wit, and expert classicist—is his reply to a chatty barber. “How should I cut your hair, sir?” “In silence” was Powell’s answer. This circulates widely in collections of modern humor and repartee and gains grudging admiration even from those who detest Powell’s politics. My guess is that Powell was well aware that he had borrowed his clever retort from the joke about the chatty barber in the
Philogelos,
or alternatively from the same quip recounted by Plutarch and attributed to King Archelaus of Macedon (p. 189). I wouldn’t even be surprised if for Powell, part of the joke was that he knew exactly where it came from and those who repeated it with such admiration clearly didn’t.
⁴

Other classical jokes can be even more deeply buried in our culture. It was pure serendipity that for bedside reading during the first weeks of my stay in Berkeley I had chosen Iris Murdoch’s novel
The Sea, the Sea.
It’s a classic Murdoch tale of angst and sexual intrigue among the privileged classes, featuring in this instance a retired actor, Charles Arrowby, who hopes (vainly) to escape his difficult metropolitan entanglements by moving to a cottage on the coast. Almost halfway through the novel, he spends a drunken evening with his friend and rival Peregrine, who is keen to stay up drinking all night. “Don’t go,” he pleads, as Charles finally makes a move. “I’ll tell you Freud’s favourite joke, if I can remember it. The king meets his double and says, ‘Did your mother work in the palace?’ and the double says, ‘No, but my father did.’ Ha ha ha, that’s a good joke!” He then drunkenly repeats it, thinking that Charles hasn’t seen the point: “. . . for Christ’s sake, don’t go, there’s another bottle. ‘
No, but my father did
’!”
⁵

Whether or not this was Freud’s favorite joke, we haven’t a clue. But Freud certainly used it as an example in his own book on jokes. There it is a member of the royal family on tour in the provinces who “noticed a man in the crowd who bore a striking resemblance to his own exalted person. He beckoned to him and asked: ‘Was your mother at one time in service in the Palace?’—‘No, your Highness,’ was the reply, ‘but my father was.’”
⁶
Murdoch’s joke jumped off the page at me. Of course it did: I’d been reading it that very day in the library. But neither Murdoch nor Freud seems to have spotted that “Freud’s favourite joke” went back almost two thousand years. Macrobius quoted it as a great example of how patiently Augustus put up with quips told at his expense (see pp. 130–31, 252n10). And Valerius Maximus quotes a very similar snatch of banter describing an encounter between a Roman governor of Sicily and an ordinary resident in the province who was his spitting image. The governor was amazed at the likeness, “since his father had never been to the province. ‘But my father went to Rome,’ the look-alike pointed out.”

The old ones, as they say, really are the best.

Cambridge

1 December 2013

Acknowledgments

I arrived at UC Berkeley in September 2008 with a mess of ideas about laughter in my head and absolutely nothing on paper. I am enormously grateful to all the classicists and ancient historians there (faculty and graduate students) for giving me the support and confidence to pull that mess together—and for making me feel so at home. I shall never forget clothes shopping with Leslie Kurke, touring the local wineries and having my first American Thanksgiving with Andy Stewart and Darlis, learning about the mysteries of election “propositions” with Kathy McCarthy, and reconnecting with Ron Stroud after more than thirty years. The graduates took me under their wing and were determined that I should miss nothing of the excitement of a U.S. presidential campaign. It is good now to bump into so many of them at conferences in different parts of the world and find them going from strength to strength. They are a great advertisement for Berkeley.

In the long process of turning the lectures into this book, I have had generous help from colleagues in Cambridge and elsewhere, who have read parts of the draft and answered queries of all kinds: Colin Annis, Franco Basso, James Clackson, Roy Gibson, Ingo Gildenhard, Simon Goldhill, Richard Hunter, Val Knight, Ismene Lada-Richards, Robin Osborne, Michael Reeve, Malcolm Schofield, Ruth Scurr, Michael Silk, Caterina Turroni, Gloria Tyler, Carrie Vout, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Tim Whitmarsh. Joyce Reynolds has read and commented on the whole manuscript (I feel very privileged to be approaching my sixtieth birthday and still able to discuss my work with my old undergraduate teacher!).

Many other people have also contributed to the project. Debbie Whittaker chased up endless references and used her unusually sharp eyes to get the bibliography under control. Lyn Bailey and the staff of the Classics Faculty Library in Cambridge went far beyond the call of duty in helping me find books and check references in the final stages. My contacts at UC Press (especially Cindy Fulton and Eric Schmidt) have been a pleasure to work with, as has Juliana Froggatt, a great copy editor. The learned commenters on my blog (
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/
) have chipped in with all kinds of sharp suggestions, from bibliography to joke interpretations; one even spotted that my subtitle was a clear, if unconscious, echo of Adam Phillips’s great book,
On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored
.

Special thanks must go to my fellow students of ancient laughter: To Stephen Halliwell, who read and discussed two key chapters with me (and boosted my confidence when it was flagging), and to Catherine Conybeare, who did likewise and kindly shared a preliminary version of her new book,
The Laughter of Sarah
(which coincidentally arrived on my desk in printed form just as I was writing my afterword). And above all to Peter Stothard, who came to the rescue on several occasions when I was feeling defeated by what I was trying to write; he had a wonderful knack of seeing my point, and how it could most effectively be put, better than I did myself.

My family, Robin, Zoe, and Raphael, have helped in all the ways that families do, and more—including (in Raphael’s case) the filial duty of helping to check references and translations. They deserve a bit of a break from
Laughter in Ancient Rome.

Texts and Abbreviations

In the notes, I have followed the conventions of
L’Année philologique
for abbreviating the titles of periodicals. For titles of ancient works, I have given a fairly full version or used the abbreviations of the
Oxford Classical Dictionary
(third edition). In a few cases where it is standard practice and there can be no confusion (e.g., Catullus or Livy), my references omit the title entirely. All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. I have used standard editions of ancient texts—Oxford Classical Texts, Teubners, or recent Loebs—but have pointed to different manuscript readings where significant. For modern works with a potentially misleading discrepancy between the date of the edition I have cited and the date of first publication, I have indicated both, in this form: Hobbes 1996 [1651].

Other abbreviations are as follows: