Laughter in Ancient Rome Page 3

  Thraso’s instant retort—“What’s the matter?” (“Quid est?” 427)—may indicate that not even he was taken in. Donatus thought that in asking that question, the stupid soldier was simply fishing for compliments for his bon mot (compliments that he did indeed receive, albeit insincerely: “Oh the wit of it!”). But Thraso’s challenge could equally well suggest that Gnatho’s pseudospontaneity had been all too easy to see through. His laugh had convinced nobody, not even the gullible character it had been intended to hoodwink.

  As if to avoid the awkward confrontation, Gnatho quickly changes the subject and moves to the attack. Was it Thraso’s joke anyway? Was he not just recycling an old one, as if it were his own? Was it, in other words, no more spontaneous than Gnatho’s enthusiastic response to it? The sponger claims he has already heard it “loads of times,” and maybe we should imagine that he had. For it is a joke we find elsewhere in Latin literature, quoted in a late antique text but attributed to a writer even earlier than Terence.

  Near the end of that strange collection of imperial biographies known as the Augustan History, concocted under a variety of pseudonyms probably in the late fourth century CE, the author stops to puzzle at how, in 284, the new emperor Diocletian quoted a line from Virgil immediately after he had killed Aper, the praetorian prefect and a potential rival, in full view of the army. Was that not an uncharacteristically literary gesture for such a military man as Diocletian? Perhaps not as uncharacteristic as it may seem, the biographer concedes. After all, he observes, soldiers had a habit of quoting well-known bits of poetry, and they were shown doing so in comic plays: “For, in fact, ‘Are you trying to pick up the tidbits, when you’re such a tasty morsel yourself?’ is a saying of Livius Andronicus.” Thraso’s joke, if you believe this account, was a classic quote from Rome’s first Latin dramatist, active a good seventy years before Terence.43

  Of course, the biographer might simply have got it wrong: from the perspective of the late fourth century, it might have been easy to confuse two venerable early Latin writers and to attribute a line of Terence to his predecessor Livius Andronicus. But if he was right, then Terence was making Thraso pass off as his own invention a gag that was already, in 161 BCE, decades old.44 For the audience, no doubt part of the joke was precisely that: the pushy soldier claiming as his own clever quip a one-liner that most of them knew already.

  New or old, the joke scored a hit against the young Rhodian at the dinner party. Or so Thraso recounts, leading us into another familiar topic in the ancient and modern theory of laughter that we have already glimpsed in Dio’s History: laughter as derision.45 Thraso was laughing at the boy, so aggressively that Gnatho purports to feel sorry for the victim (a backhanded compliment to the force of Thraso’s wit, which—as his aside indicates—is more than Parmeno, who overhears it, can take). The effect on the other dinner guests was dramatic: “They just died of laughter.” Cracking up, as we all know, can be painful; it can reduce you to helpless incapacity. “Dying of laughter” is an ancient image no less than a modern one. In fact, it was sharply literalized in a series of stories about men who really did die laughing: the fifth-century BCE painter Zeuxis (who expired, according to one Roman writer, as he laughed at his own painting of an old woman), for example, or the philosopher Chrysippus at the end of the third century BCE (according to Diogenes Laertius, writing centuries later, under the Roman Empire, it was the sight of an ass eating figs and drinking unmixed wine that finished him off).46 The “death” of Thraso’s fellow diners was part of an established ancient tradition.

  The next outburst of hahahae prompts more questions. Fed up with waiting for Thais to return, Thraso tells Gnatho to wait for her. This draws an ironic quip from Parmeno, who is now fully part of the conversation: of course Thraso should not hang around, he appears to agree; after all, it isn’t the done thing for a commanding officer to be seen in the street with his mistress. Thraso, who is many ranks below a “commanding officer,” realizes that he is being sent up and turns on the slave (“Why should I waste words on you? You’re just like your master!”), before Gnatho again laughs.

  What, as Thraso himself asks, causes the laughter this time? Is it Thraso’s retort to Parmeno? Or is it also, as Gnatho goes on to claim, the recollection of “that story about the guy from Rhodes”? (Gnatho presumably calculates that not even the gullible Thraso would think that the rather lame response of “just like your master” was capable of raising much of a laugh.) Or is it, more likely, Parmeno’s joke about the “commanding officer,” which Gnatho can hardly admit to Thraso—who was its target—had caused him to crack up (hence the smokescreen about the “guy from Rhodes” again)? In short, we have just one hahahae and at least three possible causes for the laughter that it signals. Part of the interpretative fun for the audience or reader (and indeed for the characters themselves) must come from weighing one possible cause against another, puzzling out how the laughter is best explained.47

  AUDIENCE REACTION

  How, more generally, can we approach the laughter of the people in the audience, rather than those on the stage? Unlike Dio in the Colosseum, those who came to watch The Eunuch were encouraged, even supposed to laugh—but at what, and why?

  Of course, we cannot know for certain how the audience reacted at a Roman comedy: whether, when, or how enthusiastically they laughed. If ancient theatergoers were like their modern equivalents in this respect (and that is of course a big if), part of their experience will have been shared. Many people will have laughed at the same things. They will have cheered, cried, chuckled, and applauded together: that, after all, is part of the common bond of theater. Yet at the same time, some reactions would necessarily have been more personal and idiosyncratic. Individual members of the audience would have laughed at different things, or at the same things for different reasons. And some would not have laughed at all. Most of us have had the uncomfortable experience of being in a theater (or in front of a television, for that matter), our lips barely curling, while those round about us were laughing with gusto; the louder they laugh, the less we feel we can join in and the more stony our faces become. It was similar, we may imagine, in the Roman theater. Laughter acts both to incorporate and to isolate. The history of laughing is, as we shall see, about those who don’t (or won’t) get the joke as well as about those who do.48

  Yet we have seen enough by now to make a good guess at various likely ancient responses to these episodes in The Eunuch. I have already suggested that Thraso’s quip about the young Rhodian may have raised a laugh precisely because the soldier was trying—implausibly—to pass off an old joke as his own invention (as if today someone claimed to have just thought up “Waiter, waiter, there’s a fly in my soup . . .”). But there was more to it than that. Some members of the audience may have refused to laugh (or laughed only halfheartedly) for the simple reason that it was a very old joke, one that they had heard many times before and did not much want to hear again. For others, laughter might have been prompted by the sheer familiarity of the quip. As the cliché goes, old jokes are the best—in the sense that they cause us to crack up not through the disruptions of incongruity or the pleasures of derision (as many a modern theory has it) but through the warm recollection of all the other occasions on which just the same joke has worked as intended. Laughter is as much about memory, and about the ways we have learned to laugh at certain cues, as it is about uncontrollable spontaneity.49

  Laughter’s prompts and objects are also wider ranging than we often acknowledge. Here, for example, some may have laughed because Thraso’s “joke” was not funny—and because Gnatho’s transparently unspontaneous laughter neatly exposed, in no more than those three syllables (hahahae), the mechanisms of flattery, the vulnerability of both patron and client, and the slipperiness of laughter as a signifier. The audience, in other words, was laughing at the constituents, causes, and social dynamics of laughter itself. The laughter—and its different interpretations and misinterpretations, uses and misuses, within
these scenes—is part of the joke.50

  This self-reflexivity is underlined by the simple fact that, in these two passages of The Eunuch, laughter is explicitly written into the script. To be sure, there may have been a good deal of laughter, on- as well as offstage, in Roman comedy. Certainly, modern translators of Plautus and Terence regularly introduce “laughter” into the stage directions, to bring the plays to life: phrases, in brackets—such as laughing uproariously, with a laugh, still laughing, laughing uncontrollably, laughing, trying to conceal his laughter, and laughs still more—litter English versions of these comedies, even though nothing like them is to be found in the Latin originals.51 But here Terence’s insistence, twice, on Gnatho’s hahahae, his explicit introduction of laughter into the dialogue of his play, makes this a particularly loaded moment—one in which characters, audience, and readers cannot dodge the question of what this laughter (or laughter more generally) is all about.

  The same is true of the other dozen or so cases of scripted laughter in classical Latin literature. These are all found in comedy, both Plautus and Terence, with just one possible exception: a short, and puzzling, fragment of the poet Ennius (“hahae, the shield itself fell down”), which could equally well come from a comedy or a tragedy.52 Taken together, they add to the range of circumstances in which Roman laughter might erupt and the range of emotions it might reflect, for, as we have already seen, both in the amphitheater and in the exchanges between Gnatho and the soldier, the idea that laughter is caused by jokes, or clever wit, is only one part of the story. So, for example, in one of these passages we may recognize the laughter prompted by (self-)satisfaction: the hahae of Ballio the pimp, in Plautus’ Pseudolus (1052), as he congratulates himself on outwitting the clever slave of the title. Elsewhere we catch chuckles of sheer pleasure: in Terence’s Heauton Timorumenus, or Self-Tormentor (886), when the elderly Chremes laughs in delight at the tricks that yet another clever slave has played.53

  But at the same time, these instances of comic laughter, explicitly scripted, repeatedly point audience and reader to many of the tricky interpretative dilemmas that laughter raises. Can we pin down exactly what it is that makes anyone laugh (even ourselves)? How can laughter be misunderstood or mistaken? Is a person who laughs potentially as vulnerable to the power of laughter as a person who is laughed at? It will not escape the attention of either audience or readers of the plays that in their laughter, both Ballio and Chremes have got things terribly wrong. For all his laughter of self-congratulation, Ballio has not outwitted Pseudolus at all but has actually been caught by a trick played by the slave that is even cleverer than the poor pimp can imagine. Likewise, Chremes is not, as he believes, the beneficiary of his slave’s wiles but himself their dupe and victim. It is as if the scripted laughter here serves to draw attention to laughter’s perilous fragility and the many possible constituents and interpretations of a single laugh.

  UNDERSTANDING ROMAN LAUGHTER

  In this chapter I have looked in detail at the choreography of two particular moments of Roman (written) laughter, from a pair of authors living four centuries apart—one writing in Greek, the other in Latin; one a historian with an ax to grind about laughter stifled in the Colosseum, the other both portraying and prompting laughter in the comic theater. They serve as a useful frame for what follows in the rest of the book, for, although I shall occasionally explore material later than Dio, and although I shall sometimes focus on visual images, I shall for the most part be drawing on Latin and Greek writing between the second century BCE and the second century CE.

  These examples have also opened up some of the key issues that will be central to the rest of my discussion. Beyond the dilemmas of interpretation and understanding that I have highlighted throughout, they have prompted reflection on the uncertain and disputed boundary between “faked” and “real” laughter. (When we join in the guffaws at a joke we do not quite understand, are we pretending to laugh—or just laughing differently?) They have shown how laughing could act to exclude as well as include, offer friendly support as well as hostile derision, both reaffirm and contest hierarchies and power. And Thraso’s quip about the hare turned out to be a reminder that Roman jokes could have complicated histories stretching over many centuries. Indeed we shall meet others, in the chapters that follow, whose histories stretch for thousands of years, right up to our own day.

  As I have hinted, one big question that hovers over the whole of the book is this: How comprehensible, in any terms, can Roman laughter now be? How can we understand what made the Romans laugh, without falling into the trap of turning them into a version of ourselves? Some readers may already have felt uneasy about some of my procedures in exploring those passages of The Eunuch. It was not simply that the process of dissection spoiled the joke about the young Rhodian; even more to the point, the dissection was founded on the assumption that if only we worked hard enough at it, the joke would make sense to us too, that it could be translated into terms we understand. Of course, that must sometimes be so (if it were not, then the whole of culture of Roman laughter would be lost to us, and my project stillborn). But in any individual case we must not assume that successful translation between the Roman world and our own is possible. There is a danger that the question “What made the Romans laugh?” might be converted, by an act of spurious empathy, into the question “What do I think would have made me laugh, if I were a Roman?”

  We can see this in more vivid form if we reflect on how and why modern audiences laugh at performances of Roman comedy. Part of the time it is because the jokes can be shared across the centuries. But part of the time it is because the translator, director, and actors have worked very hard to make the plays funny in modern terms—using idiom, nuance, expression, gesture, costume, and staging designed to trigger laughter for us (but bearing very little resemblance to anything Roman). What is more, at least some of the audience will have gone to the play already committed to the spirit of the enterprise, determined to find a Roman comedy funny—and at the same time laughing at themselves for doing so. It is surely this combination of factors that explains the success enjoyed in 2008 by the stand-up comedian Jim Bowen with a retelling of a selection of the jokes from the one surviving ancient jokebook, the Philogelos (Laughter lover), probably compiled in the late Roman Empire (discussed in detail in chapter 8).54 Some of those jokes are still capable of raising a laugh (indeed, more than that: some of them are the direct ancestors of our own jokes). But there were other reasons for Bowen’s success: he used a translation of the jokes that closely echoed the modern idiom and rhythms of stand-up, the audience had come to the show (or tuned in on the online site) determined to laugh, and Bowen played up the absurdity of the whole occasion—to the extent that many of the most determined laughers were also laughing at themselves for laughing at these very, very old, Roman jokes.

  So who, if anyone, was the joke on? This is a question I shall come back to in the next three chapters, which reflect on the theory and history of Roman (and other) laughter—before focusing, in the second half of the book, on particular key figures and key themes in the story of Roman laughter, from the jesting orator to the ridiculous monkey.

  Part One

  CHAPTER 2

  Questions of Laughter, Ancient and Modern

  THEORIES AND THEORY

  Marcus Tullius Cicero—the Roman world’s most renowned orator (and also one of its most infamous jokesters)—was curious about the nature of laughter. “What is it?” he asked. “What provokes it? Why does it affect so many different parts of the body all at once? Why can’t we control it?” But he knew that the answers were elusive, and he was happy to profess his ignorance. “There is no shame,” he explained in his treatise On the Orator in the mid-50s BCE, “in being ignorant of something which even the self-proclaimed experts do not really understand.”1

  He was not the only one. A couple of centuries later, Galen, the prolific medical writer and personal physician to (among others) the emperors Marcus
Aurelius and Commodus, admitted that he was stumped about the physiological cause of laughter. In his essay On Problematical Movements, he reckoned he could account for other types of involuntary bodily motion. Imagination, for example, might explain why a man gets an erection on catching sight of (or even just thinking about) his lover. But laughter, he was prepared to concede, defeated him.2

  For well over two thousand years, laughter has baffled and intrigued. Ambitious theorizing and ingenious speculation about its nature and causes have gone hand in hand with frank expressions about the impossibility of ever solving its mystery. Beyond the specific prompts to any individual outburst (“Why are you laughing?” or “Quid rides?”), laughter as a phenomenon demands explanation, yet it always seems to defeat any explanation offered. In fact, the more ambitious the theories are, the more striking laughter’s victory seems to be over those who would control, systematize, and explain it.

  To study the “laughterhood” of ancient Rome involves reflecting on when, why, and how Romans laughed, but also on how they tried to make sense of laughter, what they—or at least those who had the leisure to think and write—thought it was, and what might cause it. So this chapter will start by exploring some of the wide range of Roman theorizing on the subject and some of the sources of Roman ideas. Where did they look when they wanted to explain why they laughed? Was Aristotle (and in particular his discussion of comedy in the lost second book of the Poetics) really the origin of most ancient thought on the subject? Was there such as thing, as has often since been claimed, as “the classical theory of laughter”?