Laughter in Ancient Rome (46 page)

19.
Though, conceivably, in opting for “crowfoot”
L&S
had in mind
Ranunculus sardous
(the “Sardinian buttercup” or “laughing parsley”), a member of the crowfoot family that is said (by, e.g., Pausanias 10.17.13, though not by Pliny,
HN
25.172–74) to produce a sardonic grin.

20.
Fried et al. 1998.

21.
Plato (
Resp.
5.452d–e, and
Phlb.
49b–50e) expresses a view of laughter as derisory; in general, as Halliwell 2008, 276–302, makes clear, Plato has much more to say about laughter than is usually recognized.

22.
One influential recent source of this is Skinner 2004, which, as its title hints, explicitly equates Aristotle with “the classical theory of laughter” and has telling references throughout to “Aristotle’s theory” (141) or even “Aristotelian theory in its most blinkered form” (153). See also Skinner 2001 and 2002 for similar, though not identical, versions of the argument. Other references to Aristotle as a systematic theorist, or to one or both of his two main laughter “theories,” include Morreall 1983, 5; Le Goff 1997, 43; Critchley 2002, 25; Taylor 2005, 1. Billig 2005, 38–39, is a rare discordant view, describing Plato and Aristotle as offering “scattered observations” rather than “theories.”

23.
The classic attempt to find the Greek sources of Cicero’s account of laughter in
De or.
2 is Arndt 1904, esp. 25–40, identifying Demetrius of Phaleron as the principal influence. Greek sources also play a major part in the discussion of Cicero in Grant 1924, 71–158. More recently, along similar lines, Freudenburg claimed, “It is quite clear that the Hellenistic handbook writers on rhetoric, followed by Cicero, made no significant advance upon Aristotle’s theory of the liberal jest” (1993, 58). “The liberal jest” is the hallmark of the witty gentleman (
eutrapelos
); see above, p. 32.

24.
To parody Whitehead 1979 [1929], 39, with its famous claim that the “European philosophical tradition . . . consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”

25.
For example, McMahon 1917; Cantarella 1975.

26.
Eco 1983. Not all critics have admired
The Name of the Rose.
For Žižek (1989, 27–28), “there is something wrong with this book” (“
spaghetti
structuralism” as he nastily calls it) and its views on laughter. Laughter, in Žižek’s worldview, is not simply “liberating” or “anti-totalitarian” (his words) at all, but often “part of the game” of totalitarianism.

27.
Skinner 2008 (my italics). Classicists have been known to write in similar, if slightly less confident, terms; see, for example, Freudenburg 1993, 56.

28.
Janko 1984, revisited by Janko 2001. Now in the de Coislin collection in the Bibliothèque Nationale (hence its modern name), the
Tractatus
was once part of a monastery library on Mount Athos. The sections most directly concerned with laughter are 5–6; some of their observations are very close to those found in a preface to manuscripts of Aristophanes and clearly belong to the same tradition—whatever that is.

29.
Eloquent are, for example, Arnott 1985 (nicely summarizing, at 305, the much earlier conclusion of Bernays 1853, to the effect that the
Tractatus
was “a miserable compilation by a pedantic ignoramus”); Silk 2000, 44 (“Janko’s rewarding study . . . tends to evade its striking mediocrity”). Nesselrath (1990, 102–61) carefully argues against a direct Aristotelian connection but produces Theophrastus out of his hat. Halliwell 2013 (reviewing Watson 2012) is a succinct denunciation of the
Tractatus.

30.
Silk 2000, 44.

31.
I owe much here to the view of Aristotle’s theory of tragedy in Silk 2001. Note especially 176: “Aristotle’s theory (indeed, his treatise [
Poetics
] as a whole), nevertheless, enjoys the reputation of a coherent argument, and not merely a series of brilliant, but loosely connected,
aperçus.
What is responsible for this? The answer, I suggest, is not the findings of Aristotle’s scholarly interpreters (whose very public disagreements about this, that and the other point of doctrine tell their own story), but rather the constructive—or constructional—use made of Aristotle in post-Aristotelian theories of tragedy (and/or other serious drama), for which Aristotle’s theory of tragedy is a given, and for which it is characteristically constructed as a
coherent
given.” Although I would probably lay more responsibility at the door of Aristotle’s modern “scholarly interpreters” (as Silk himself does in the footnote to this passage), the role of Renaissance historians and modern “laughter theorists” (from the Renaissance on) seems to me crucial in the retrospective construction of “the Aristotelian theory of laughter” too. For an even more trenchant view of the general incoherence of the
Poetics,
see Steiner 1996: “As I listen, endlessly, to debates on the
Poetics
. . . I am prepared to wager that the young man who took notes at Aristotle’s lecture was sitting very near the door on a very noisy day” (545n5).

32.
A “theory of laughter” would also imply the definition of laughter as an independent field of inquiry. Despite a range of (lost) treatises “on the laughable” (περὶ τοῦ γελοίου) and despite intense ancient speculation on many aspects of laughter, it is not clear that laughter was ever so defined in antiquity; see Billig 2005, 38–39. The distinction drawn here between “ideas (or even theories) about” and a “theory of” is a crucial one, and my choice of expression throughout this book will reflect that importance.

33.
Eth. Nic.
4.8, 1127b34–1128b9, a passage that has prompted very different reactions from critics: subtle and sophisticated for Halliwell 2008, esp. 307–22; muddled (“it slides from tautology to tautology”) for Goldhill 1995, 19. Halliwell 2008, 307–31, provides a useful point of departure, with bibliography, for all the passages I discuss here.

34.
Part. an.
3.10, 673a6–8: τοῦ δὲ γαργαλίζεσθαι μόνον ἄνθρωπον αἴτιον ἥ τε λεπτότης τοῦ δέρματος καὶ τὸ μόνον γελᾶν τῶν ζῴων ἄνθρωπον (not
De Anima
3.10 as Bakhtin 1968, 68, has it). See further Labarrière 2000 (which does not, for me, rescue the passage from the charge of circularity).

35.
Eth. Nic.
4.8, 1128a30; earlier in the passage (1128a4–7), Aristotle characterizes “buffoons” as those who do not avoid giving pain to the butts of their jokes (τὸν σκωπτόμενον). Much modern criticism of Aristotle’s view on comedy has focused on his attitude to Aristophanic Old Comedy and the personal attacks on individuals it contains (see, for example, Halliwell 1986, 266–276, esp. 273, which critiques that focus; M. Heath 1989); this may not be unrelated to his views on laughter, but it is not my concern here.

36.
Poet.
5, 1449a32–37: μίμησις φαυλοτέρων μέν, οὐ μέντοι κατὰ πᾶσαν κακίαν, ἀλλὰ τοῦ αἰσχροῦ ἐστι τὸ γελοῖον μόριον. τὸ γὰρ γελοῖόν ἐστιν ἁμάρτημά τι καὶ αἶσχος ἀνώδυνον καὶ οὐ φθαρτικόν, οἷον εὐθὺς τὸ γελοῖον πρόσωπον αἰσχρόν τι καὶ διεστραμμένον ἄνευ ὀδύνης.

37.
Rh.
2.12, 1389b10–12: καὶ φιλογέλωτες, διὸ καὶ φιλευτράπελοι· ἡ γὰρ εὐτραπελία πεπαιδευμένη ὕβρις ἐστίν. Note that Aristotle does not say that “wit” is the
only
way that those who are fond of laughter demonstrate this fondness—rather that those who are fond of laughter will also be witty.

38.
The very nature of theater raises one problem about the location of the potential pain. The tacit assumption seems to be that the pain would be that of the actors in their comic masks, at whom the audience laughs. But why would they, whose job it was to provoke laughter, have been liable to
pain
in the face of it? A similar point is made, in relation to Aristophanes, by Sommerstein 2009, 112.

39.
Goldhill 1995, 19; the issue is made even more loaded by the fact that the
Nichomachean Ethics
itself is addressed to the πεπαιδευμένος (
Eth. Nich.
1.3, 1094b22–25).

40.
Exactly how far Aristotle is presenting laughter as derisive in this passage is debatable. It depends in part on how far you imagine that his τὸ γελοῖον carries the derisive sense of the Greek word καταγελᾶν (“to laugh down” or “scoff at”). It is certainly true that Aristotle in the
Poetics
appears to offer a genealogy of comedy from aggressive satire, but the implications of this for laughter as a whole are less clear. Malcolm Schofield has usefully suggested to me that we might see the Aristotelian witty gentleman as a “tease” who gently makes fun of someone’s faults, in such a way as to give pleasure rather than pain—complicated by the fact (as Aristotle notes in
Eth. Nic.
4.8, 1128a27–8) that people vary in what they find pleasurable or painful.

41.
As is well known, the image of laughter in Greek literature is much more varied, nuanced, and (sometimes) gentle than derision. One classic example is the parental laughter of Hector and Andromache (Homer,
Il.
6.471) when baby Astyanax takes fright at the sight of the plume of his father’s helmet.

42.
Rh.
1.11, 1371b34–35; the words are bracketed in, for example, Kassel 1976, following Spengel 1867—and the exclusion tentatively supported by Fortenbaugh 2000, 340. Fortenbaugh 2000, with 2002, 120–126, provides a useful discussion of the topic.

43.
David,
In Isagogen
204.15–16: “Other animals too are capable of laughter, as Aristotle says in the
History of Animals
about the heron” (ἔστι καὶ ἄλλα ζῷα γελαστικά, ὥσπερ ἱστορεῖ ὁ Ἀριστοτέλης ἐν τῇ ∏ερὶ ζῴων περὶ τοῦ ἐρωδιοῦ). How exactly we are to explain this claim (mistake, misremembering, or subsequent loss of the relevant passage of Aristotle) is unclear.

44.
Porphyry,
Isagoge
4 (κἂν γὰρ μὴ γελᾷ ἀεί, ἀλλὰ γελαστικὸν λέγεται οὐ τῷ ἀεὶ γελᾶν ἀλλὰ τῷ πεφυκέναι), trans. Barnes 2003. Other writers of Roman imperial date to make this claim include Quintilian,
Inst.
5.10.58; Clement,
Paedagogus
2.5. The fact that in the second century CE, Lucian (
Vit auct.
26) explicitly associates this claim with a character representing Peripatetic philosophy may, but does not necessarily, mean that it originated with Aristotle or his immediate successors (there were plenty of “Peripatetic philosophers” in the Roman Empire). See further, Barnes 2003, 208–9n22.

45.
Ménager 1995, 7–41 (on the history of this idea from antiquity to the Renaissance); Screech 1997, 1–5. On Jesus, see Le Goff 1992. In the canonical gospels of the New Testament, Jesus never laughs; he does so repeatedly in the fragmentary Gnostic “Gospel of Judas” (see Pagels and King 2007, 128, arguing that his laughter always introduces the correction of an error).

46.
Physiology of laughter: Pliny,
HN
11.198; Aristotle,
Part. an.
3.10, 673a1–12; babies: Pliny,
HN
7.2, 7.72; Aristotle,
Hist. an.
9.10, 587b5–7. On Zoroaster, see Herrenschmidt 2000; Hambartsumian 2001.