Funny Words in Plautine Comedy (review)

It is a well-known fact that anyone addicted to jokes based on wordplay deserves to be punished. My mathematician father was such a one. A mathematician friend of his, never previously known to display any signs of possessing a sense of humor, once wholly redeemed himself in the eyes of my revered parent by telling how, on a recent trip to China, he had been reminded of his colleague when seeing a sign giving a shop owner's name: Yu Pun Wong. To elucidate so subtle, elusive, and unstable a linguistic game as this from a culture so far from our own as the archaic Latin theater is a task requiring a high degree of, in almost equal measure, philological expertise, creative imagination, and generous readership (which is willing to grant the benefit of the doubt). Fontaine brings the first two desiderata to this book; on the whole, I am inclined to bring the last.

Fontaine's thesis is that Plautus' work contains a significant number of puns which for various reasons (archaic spelling, very early missing of the point, loss of colloquial vocabulary) became barely visible almost as soon as the plays moved from being theater scripts into being literary texts. Exegesis (one is inclined to say, extraction) of these wordplays has a number of effects: not only the production of humor, which is likely to be the most accessible, but also a reflection on the nature of the audience (elite, sophisticated, and bilingual, at least in part), clarification of character and plot, and rectification of the supposedly false view of Plautine comedy as surreal buffoonery in a Greco-Roman never-never land. It is this last point with which I find it hardest to agree. Even if we accept Fontaine's arguments that there are no Latin names in Plautine comedy (all those you are thinking of are shown in fact to be Greek names with Latin jokes momentarily or lastingly attached), and that Plautus is not only interested in buffoonery, the argument for a Plautus who is simply Graecum magis ("a more Greek thing," cf. Pl. Men. 9), just another Hellenistic poet, rather than one for whom being Graecum magis, in Latin, in Rome, is a great joke and a remarkably astute act of commentary on contemporary culture, strikes me as an unnecessary simplification.

Many of the puns and similar jokes that Fontaine identifies are not immediately obvious from the text alone, while some of them, once explained, would come into the category of "painfully obvious," the joke which is funny by not being funny. Fontaine makes the suggestion that such jokes might be indicated in performance by sound or gesture, in the manner of modern performance in which a "drum roll and cymbal crash [to] coincide with the collective groan of the audience" (41). One of my teenage sons often uses a mimed version of this, somewhat ironically, to acknowledge attempts at humor in others. Fontaine calls these "rimshot" jokes. Since we are regularly told that we miss so much by having only the text of a Plautine play rather than the total performance, the proposition seems plausible. It is worth bearing in mind the likelihood of such visual and aural clues, if the reader finds him or herself thinking the likelihood rather small that the audience would pick up on so complex a pun as those suggested by Fontaine.

A good pun needs more than just complete or partial homophony of two words, but must be linked back in by some further element in meaning or suggestion. A potential problem with some of the puns identified by Fontaine is that they seem almost to go too far in the direction of additional complexity, such that two or even more hidden steps are required in order to link the elements together. One example is in the short section entitled "Follow the Money" (164-68) on lucre in Amphitryo. The analysis opens with a nice reading of the nomen-omen in Merc-ury's connection with merc...