Laughter in Ancient Rome Page 8

  One problem, then, is not whether historical laughter is familiar or strange to us (it is both) but how to distinguish the familiar elements from the strange and how to establish where the boundary between the two lies. We always run two different and opposite risks: both of exaggerating the strangeness of past laughter and of making it all too comfortably like our own.

  By and large, classicists have erred on the side of familiarity, wanting so far as possible to join in the laughter of the Greeks and Romans, and they have often worked very hard to find and explain the funny points in ancient comedy and the quips, jokes, and other kinds of repartee signaled in Roman literature. Sometimes they have had to “emend”—or even effectively to rewrite—the ancient texts as they have come down to us to rescue the jokes they once contained. These desperate measures are not necessarily as illegitimate as they might appear at first sight. Inevitably there is a potentially large gap between what any ancient writer originally wrote and the version of their works, copied and recopied, that has reached the modern reader. The medieval monks who transcribed by hand so many works of classical literature could be very inaccurate, especially when they did not fully understand what they were copying or did not see its significance. Not unlike the complicated system of Roman numerals (whose details were almost invariably garbled in the scribal process), jokes were a common area for error. The errors can be glaring. One particularly dim copyist, for example, when transcribing the discussion of laughter in the second book of Cicero’s On the Orator, systematically replaced the word iocus (“joke”) with locus (“place,” in the sense of “passage in a book”). He removed the laughter at a stroke, but his mistake has been straightforward, and uncontroversial, to correct.8

  Sometimes, however, more radical ingenuity has been required. In the sixth book of his Handbook on Oratory, Quintilian (writing in the second century CE) also turned to the role of laughter in the repertoire of the orator. In the text we have—an amalgam of manuscript copies and the suggestions of now centuries of academic editors—many of his examples of what might prompt laughter in a speech seem at best flat, at worst garbled or close to nonsense, hardly the witticisms that Quintilian cracked them up to be. In a notable study of these, Charles Murgia claimed to have restored some point to a series of key passages. Thanks to his clever reconstructions of Quintilian’s original Latin, several of the jokes, puns, and wordplays have apparently been brought back to life. But the nagging question is: Whose joke is it? Has Murgia really taken us back to the Roman quip, or has he actually adjusted the Latin to produce a satisfactorily modern joke?9

  One snatch of repartee, quoted with approval by Quintilian, gives a good idea of the intricacy, technical complexity, and deep uncertainty of the whole process of getting and reconstructing these ancient gags. It is worth looking at in some detail. The passage in question is a courtroom exchange between an accuser and a defendant called Hispo, whose wisecrack we are supposed to admire. The text in the most recent printed edition of Quintilian goes like this: “When Hispo was being charged with pretty outrageous crimes, he said to his accuser, ‘Are you measuring me according to your own standards?’” Or in Latin: “Ut Hispo obicienti atrociora crimina accusatori, ‘me ex te metiris?’”10 This text is the product of much hard work by modern scholars “improving” what is preserved in the manuscripts. Atrociora (pretty outrageous) has replaced the next-to-meaningless arbore (tree) of the manuscript versions. Metiris (“measure,” from the verb metiri) has been substituted for the word mentis (which looks as if it might come from the verb mentiri, with an n, meaning “to lie”—but it would be a hopelessly ungrammatical form). And me ex te (me according to your standards) has been incorporated to complete the sense.11 But even with these emendations, the exchange seems decidedly lame, hardly the kind of thing to raise much of a laugh.

  Murgia intervened, partly by going back to the manuscript version and partly by going beyond it. On his reading, the prosecutor was conducting his case “in language marred by barbarisms” (obicienti barbare crimina accusatori, replacing arbore with barbare rather than atrociora). Hispo instantly defended himself, and cleverly raised a laugh, by responding, exactly as the manuscripts have it, with a glaring barbarism. “Mentis,” he said, or “You is lying,” as Murgia translates it—so trying to capture something of the jarring note sounded by the ungrammatical Latin (mentis being, as he interprets it, an intentionally awkward active form of a verb that ought have been used in the passive form, mentiris). It certainly seems to make a funnier point: Hispo replies to an accuser who is attacking him in bad and barbarous Latin with some very bad, barbarous, and ungrammatical Latin indeed.12

  But is it what Quintilian wrote? It is hard entirely to banish the suspicion that Murgia may have cleverly emended the usual version of Quintilian’s text to make it funny for us. “Mentis,” or “You is lying,” does, to be sure, stick close to the manuscripts, right or wrong, but “in language marred by barbarisms” has little support beyond the fact that it contributes to a joke that sounds plausible enough to the modern ear.13 And maybe it is rather too plausible. Maybe Hispo’s joke really was feeble by our standards, even if it prompted Roman laughter for reasons we cannot now recapture. Or maybe, despite the spotlight Quintilian gives to it, it was feeble by the standards of most Romans too.

  The truth is that one of the categories to which historians and theorists of laughter have paid the least attention is the “bad joke” (in Latin usually frigidus, a “cold joke”)—although, as Twain captured so nicely, in the day-to-day world of laughing and jesting, bad jokes are ubiquitous, can play an important part in defining what counts as good to laugh at, and may tell us as much about laughter’s history and culture as “good” ones.

  Recently, in a wide-ranging study of the “funny words” in the Latin comedies of Plautus (the major predecessor of Terence, writing in the late third or early second century BCE), Michael Fontaine has been even more ambitious than Murgia.14 Fontaine’s project has been to rescue the puns throughout these plays, not only those that the plodding medieval monks overlooked but those that he claims had been lost in antiquity itself, almost as soon as the plays reached written form.15 He conjures up some exuberant—and indeed quite laughable—moments in Plautine comedy. To take one of the very simplest examples, in Plautus’ Rope, a character who has struggled to shore after a shipwreck declares that he “is freezing,” algeo. Fontaine here suggests a pun on the Latin word alga, or “seaweed,” as if the word meant “covered in seaweed,” and he goes on to imagine that part of the joke is that the character in question was dressed in a seaweed costume.16

  Who knows? Like many of the other conjectures in the book, this is learned, ingenious, and even quite funny. But whether Fontaine is revealing (as one commentator has it) jokes that have “lain dormant . . . for centuries”17 or offering pleasing modern inventions that rescue the jokes for us is a moot point. In fact, this kind of approach should prompt us to think harder about the criteria available for figuring out exactly which lines in an ancient comedy were likely to have provoked ancient laughter. How much laughter we would have heard in the Roman comic theater, and at what particular moments in the script, is a trickier question than it might seem.

  VISUAL LAUGHTER

  An even starker instance of the modern dilemmas in recapturing Roman laughter is found in ancient visual images. The first problem is to decide when ancient paintings or sculptures are attempting to represent laughter or smiles—or, more precisely, it is hard to decide what counts as an ancient visual representation of laughter or smiles. There is very little as straightforward as Terence’s instantly recognizable hahahae.18

  To our eyes, obvious laughers seem to be few and far between in the surviving repertoire of Greco-Roman art, though why that should be is less clear. To focus just on sculpture, a recent survey of scholars in the field elicited disappointing answers to the question of why there is so little laughter captured in ancient marble or bronze: “The prime reason is one of genre. Gr
eek sculpture is broadly religious,” ventured one; “Because laughter distorts the body” or “[It] has to do with the issue of decorum,” others suggested; “A limitation of the sculptor’s technique,” another rather desperately hazarded.19 Of course, as is well known, the facial expression of many early Greek statues (especially the so-called kouroi and korai of the seventh to early fifth centuries BCE) is regularly called the “archaic smile,” but it is far from certain that it represented a smile in our sense of the word—rather than, to take just a couple of modern suggestions, a sense of animation or of aristocratic contentment.20 And no less ambivalent are those apparently laughing Gorgons (are they really grimacing?), comic masks (are they intended to be grotesque rather than laughing?), and satyrs (who sport an uncontrolled animalistic rictus more than a laugh perhaps).21

  These uncertainties are not, in fact, restricted to the art of the classical world. Surprising as it may now seem, it was only in the late nineteenth century that one of the best-known paintings of a laughing subject—Frans Hals’s seventeenth-century The Laughing Cavalier (see fig. 1)—was given that title or even referred to as an image of laughter. What prompted the new description (or why it stuck so firmly) is difficult to determine. But it is largely thanks to its now-familiar title that we treat this painting so unquestioningly as an image of a laugher rather than of a man with “a disdainful half-smile and provocative air”—or, for that matter, a man of uncertain expression with an upturned moustache.22

  But if the identification of laughers in art is tricky, it is even trickier to identify the images that might have elicited laughter from a Roman viewer. In a major book, Looking at Laughter, John Clarke attempted to do just that. He assembled an extraordinary range of Roman art, from grotesques to caricatures, from parodies to the ancient equivalent of strip cartoons, and tried to use it to open up the world of popular, lusty, raucous, and sometimes rude Roman laughter. It is a hugely engaging study and, what is more, brings to our attention some intriguing—and largely forgotten—Roman images. But at the same time, it confronts us with another version of the problem I have just been pondering. How do we know that Romans, or some Romans, laughed at these images? To put it another way, who is laughing here? Is it the Romans? Or us? Or is it us trying to imagine—even impersonate—the Romans?23

  Take one of Clarke’s prime examples: not in this case a forgotten image, but the famous mosaic on the floor of the entrance hall of the so-called House of the Tragic Poet, showing a ferocious dog greeting the visitor and underneath the words CAVE CANEM—“Beware of the Dog” (see fig. 2). It is one of a group of three such entranceway mosaics in Pompeii apparently depicting the domestic guard dog for the visitor to walk over (which now decorate thousands of modern tourist souvenirs, from postcards to fridge magnets). For Clarke, they all would have prompted ancient laughter, because of the double take between illusion and reality, but the example in the House of the Tragic Poet would have elicited more chuckles than the others precisely because of the associated writing. That CAVE CANEM served to draw attention to the fact that the dog in question was only an illusion, to “unmask the humor of the artifice”—and so to prompt laughter.24

  I share Clarke’s view of the importance of illusion and imitation in producing Roman laughter. Less convincing is his attempt to explain the social function of the laughter that might have erupted at the entranceway to these houses—where he reaches too easily for that over-used term apotropaic. Entrances, he suggests, were dangerous liminal spaces in the Roman imagination; a peal of laughter in the hallway was good defense against the evil eye.25 But—apotropaic or not—none of this cut much ice with his fellow art historian Roger Ling. In an otherwise warm review of Clarke’s book, Ling insisted that the mosaic was not funny at all but meant in deadly earnest. It was intended to alert visitors—with both the words and the picture—to “the creature that awaited unwelcome intruders.” That is to say, “it was no joke!”26

  There is no sure way that we can decide between these alternatives—between what might be, on Clarke’s part (or my own), overenthusiasm for the unearthing of laughter where it might never have occurred and down-to-earth common sense, bordering on a failure of imagination, on the part of Ling. Yet this opposition reminds us of another side to the discursive complexity of laughter, at once baffling and intriguing. Notwithstanding all those grand theories of laughter, there is nothing that, intrinsically, causes human beings to crack up; there is nothing that systematically and unfailingly guarantees laughter as a response, even within the norms and conventions of an individual culture. Incongruity, as one theory would have it, may often prompt laughter, but not all examples of incongruity do so, and not for everyone. A joke that raises chortles at a wedding will almost certainly not do so at a funeral—or as Plutarch noted (see pp. 27–28), what makes you laugh in the company of friends will not do so when you are with your father or your wife.

  Over and above any psychological or evolutionary determinants, what makes words, gestures, or events seem laugh-able is that, for whatever reason, the culture in question has defined them as such (or at least as potentially such), has encouraged its members to laugh at them in certain contexts, and, by processes that I suspect are now entirely irrecoverable, has made that laughter appear “natural.” So whether CAVE CANEM provoked laughter among Roman visitors to the House of the Tragic Poet depends on how far they had learned to see, in Clarke’s terms, the unmasking of visual artifice as laugh-able or how far they saw the image, as Ling would have it, as an information notice about a dangerous dog—or how far both readings were possible, according to different circumstances, moods, or viewers.

  It is for these reasons, despite all the possible perils of studying “written laughter,” that this book concentrates on those cases, more numerous than you might expect, where Roman literature makes laughter explicit—where its eruption is signaled, discussed, or debated—rather than focusing on images or texts that may (or may not) have been intended to raise a laugh. So there is less in what follows on the laughter that might have been prompted by paintings or sculpture or that might have been heard in the comic theater; there is much more on the stories that Romans told about particular occasions of laughter, of all sorts, and on their discussions of its functions, effects, and consequences.

  ENTER BAKHTIN

  In framing his manifesto for a history of laughter, Keith Thomas had much more in mind than the question of how to spot the joke in any particular period of the past. He was interested in tracking historical changes in the principles and practice of laughter and in thinking about how they might be explained. As he put it, in broaching this subject, he aimed “to gain some insight into changing human sensibilities.”27

  So in his survey of Tudor and Stuart laughter, he pointed to a general shift over that period from the outspoken, popular, coarse, often scatological forms of laughter (including all the carnivalesque forms of inversion—“the ‘holiday humour’ which accompanied those occasions of licensed burlesque and disorder which were an annual feature of most Tudor institutions”) toward an atmosphere that was much more controlled and “policed.” The “rites of misrule” were gradually eliminated, he observed, and there was a narrowing of the subjects seen fit for ridicule: much less jesting about bodily deformity, a growing aversion to crude scatology, and a marked tempering of open ribaldry at the expense of clerics and the social hierarchy. We are not far, on Thomas’s model, from the world of antigelastic decorum notoriously summed up in Lord Chesterfield’s advice to his son in the mid-eighteenth century, much quoted in the history of laughter (and its absences): “Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill manners. . . . In my mind there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter.”28

  What caused the change? Thomas suggested a variety of factors. He noted, for example, a more general emphasis in this period on bodily control as a marker of a social hierarchy—of which laughter, and its associated bodily disruptions, was just one aspect.29
He stressed the growing cultural importance of the middle class, for whom the old inversionary rituals of laughter (assuming as they did a binary division of English society into high and low) no longer seemed so pointed or so relevant: “Lords and servants could exchange places, but for the middle classes, who had no polar opposite, role-reversal was impossible.” He also reflected on the increasingly “precarious” position of some key institutions over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which acted to discourage, rather than to encourage, laughter. “Once the underlying security of medieval religion had gone, laughter had to be kept out of the churches. Once the social hierarchy was challenged, the laughter of carnival and festive inversion seemed a threat rather than a support. Once the aristocracy had been temporarily dethroned, during the Commonwealth, it seemed imperative to build a wall of decorum which would safeguard its position thereafter.”30

  It is perhaps surprising that in the course of this, Thomas did not mention the name of Mikhail Bakhtin, a Soviet theorist and the author of Rabelais and His World—an extraordinarily influential study of François Rabelais’s controversial classic of the mid-sixteenth century, his multivolume satiric novel Gargantua and Pantagruel.31 For Thomas’s characterization of feasts of misrule and other forms of inversionary carnivalesque celebrations has much in common with Bakhtin’s account of laughter in Rabelais and His World—which has inspired, or under-pinned, many recent attempts to explore historical developments in (to translate Bakhtin literally) European “laughter culture.” In fact, after Aristotle and the three theories, Bakhtin represents the most recent shadow to hang heavily over modern discussions of laughter and its history. But unlike the theorists I considered in chapter 2, he was concerned not with the causes of laughter but with universal patterns of how laughter operates (between high and low) and, in particular, with its social and political operations within medieval and Renaissance culture—and (like Thomas) with the story of how those operations changed.