Laughter in Ancient Rome (5 page)

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).
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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.”
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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.
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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”?

The chapter will move on to consider modern theories of laughter, partly to point up their relationship with their ancient predecessors (for almost every modern social or psychological theory on this subject—I am not referring to neuroscience here—turns out to have some precedent in the Greco-Roman world). But there are some even more fundamental questions to be broached. What resources are at our disposal when we attempt to make some sense of laughter, either now or in the past, at home or abroad? What wider cultural purposes do theories of laughter serve? When we ask, for example, “Do dogs laugh?,” what is that question about? It is not usually, I think we can safely say, about dogs.

But first let us get a flavor of Roman speculation about laughter—and its diversity—starting with some of the theories and observations scattered throughout the vast encyclopedia (the
Natural History
) of that obsessive Roman polymath Gaius Plinius Secundus—or Pliny the Elder, as he is now usually known.

ROMAN QUESTIONS—AND OURS

Pliny was inquisitive about laughter—as he was inquisitive about almost everything else in his world. (It was, in a way, his scientific curiosity that killed him, when he went fatally close to the fumes of Vesuvius in the eruption of 79 CE). In the thirty-seven books of the
Natural History,
with, as he boasted, its “twenty thousand facts worth knowing,” he returned to the subject several times. At what age do human infants begin to laugh? he wondered. Where in the body does laughter originate? Why do people laugh if you tickle them under their arms?
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Those are familiar enough questions, and they continue to exercise modern students of laughter even now. Less comfortably familiar are some of Pliny’s answers. Human infants, he confidently assures his readers, do not laugh until they are forty days old, except for Zoroaster, the ancient Iranian prophet, who laughed on the very day he was born—presumably a mark of his superhuman quality.
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Pliny also identifies various organs in the human body that are responsible for laughter. One is the diaphragm, “the main site of merriment” (“praecipua hilaritatis sedes”), as he calls it. Its importance in producing laughter is proved, he explains, by the ticklishness of the armpits. For, in Pliny’s version of human anatomy, the diaphragm extends right up to the arms; scratching the armpits, where “the skin is finer than anywhere else in the body,” directly stimulates the diaphragm and so causes laughter.
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But the spleen is involved too. Or at least “there are those who think that if the spleen is removed [or reduced], a man’s capacity for laughter is removed at the same time, and that excessive laughter is caused by a large spleen.”
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Elsewhere in Pliny’s encyclopedia we find all kinds of fantastic tales about laughter—earnestly recounted, however weird they may seem to us. There is, for example, the curious fact about Crassus (the grandfather of the more famous Marcus Licinius Crassus, killed at the battle of Carrhae in 53 BCE), who, “so they say,” never once laughed in his whole life. His story leads off a long discussion of people with strange bodily peculiarities: from Socrates, who always wore the same facial expression and never seemed happy or sad, to Antonia (the daughter of Mark Antony), who never spat, and a certain Pomponius, “a poet and a man of consular rank,” who never belched.
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Plants and a variety of other natural features have a part to play too. Pliny tells of the marvelous
gelotophyllis
(laughter leaves) that grew in Bactria, a region on the borders of modern Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, and along the banks of the river Borysthenes (the modern Dnieper). If it was consumed in a mixture of myrrh and wine, it produced hallucinations and laughter, which could be controlled only by an antidote of “pine-nut kernels, with pepper and honey in palm wine.” Was this a cannabis plant, as some modern readers of Pliny have hoped? Or was it, more prosaically, as one dictionary has it, “probably a sort of crowfoot”?
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Also in the Eastern Roman Empire, in what is now central Turkey, Pliny points to two extraordinary springs, Claeon (Weeping) and Gelon (Laughing), so called—he explains—from the Greek words for the effect that drinking from each one had. Springs had a definite association with ancient laughter. Pomponius Mela, for example, a Roman geographer and contemporary of Pliny, refers to another pair on “the Fortunate Islands” (probably the Canaries): the water of one would make you laugh to death; the other, luckily, was an effective antidote. But it was Pliny’s story that made a particular impression on Sir William Ramsay, an intrepid Scot from Aberdeen and late nineteenth-century explorer of Asia Minor, who took it so seriously that he tried to locate the very springs, in rural Phrygia. Having resolved in 1891, he wrote, “to test out every spring at Apameia,” he found two that neatly fitted the bill—though, oddly, he seems to have identified them on the basis of the sound their water made (“We could hear the bright, clear, cheerful sound with which the ‘Laughing Water’ ripples forth. . . . No one who goes to these two fountains and listens will entertain the slightest doubt that they are ‘the Laughing’ and ‘the Weeping’”). Pliny, by contrast, was referring to the water’s power: one spring made you laugh, the other cry.
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Where Pliny found his information is not always clear. Occasionally (and perhaps more often than modern critics tend to acknowledge) it came from personal observation or inquiry. That is almost certainly the case for one part of his discussion of the role of the diaphragm in producing laughter, which ends by noting a much more ghoulish version of the phenomenon of underarm tickling. It can be seen both on the battlefield and in gladiatorial shows, he claims, when the diaphragm is punctured, rather than merely scratched, that the result can be death—accompanied by laughter. The idea that wounds to the diaphragm could provoke laughter from military casualties had a long history in Greek scientific writing, going back at least to the fourth century BCE. But it may well have been Pliny himself, from his experience as a spectator in the Roman arena, who made the connection with the deaths of gladiators.
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