Laughter in Ancient Rome (4 page)

Dissected in this clinical way, Thraso’s witticism may seem to lose whatever capacity to raise a laugh that it might once have had (following the iron rule, which goes back to antiquity itself, that a joke explained is a joke lost
⁴⁰
). Yet the bare bones of the joke that are revealed could fit comfortably enough into several modern theories of joking technique, from Sigmund Freud’s
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
to the numerous modern and ancient discussions that see incongruity (and/or its resolution) at the heart of what makes us laugh. So here the impossible, nonsensical incongruity from which the joke starts (the young Rhodian is not a hare) is economically resolved as we realize that the “hare” and the “delicacies” can have quite different referents in the erotic encounter of the dinner party, or, to put it in the terms of one leading current theory, the clash between the culinary and the erotic “script” is gradually resolved in favor of the latter.
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Why on earth the resolution of incongruity, or whatever is supposedly going on within the Freudian unconscious, should cause that distinctive vocal and bodily response we know as
laughing
is a question that no modern theory—not even Freud’s—satisfactorily answers.
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But in this case, that problem is sidestepped, for we quickly suspect that it is not actually the joke that is making Gnatho laugh after all. Gnatho is laughing because he is a sponger, and the ancient cliché was that spongers flattered their patrons by laughing at their jokes, whether they were funny or, more likely, not. This
hahahae
is not a spontaneous reaction to a hilarious one-liner but a well-practiced response to his patron’s verbal posturing masquerading as a spontaneous reaction. Gnatho is laughing to please. This is another aspect of that complex relationship between laughter and power that I have already highlighted.

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.