Distorted Ideals in Greek Vase-Painting: The World of Mythological Burlesque (review)

A satyr, outfitted with Herakles' lion skin and club, bounds towards a tree to pluck the wine jugs that hang from its branches in place of the apples of the Hesperides; Cadmus topples over and defecates in fear at the sight of the serpent he is supposed to slay; a very male Sphinx masturbates over a cowering Oedipus—all these parodies of mythological subjects appear on the Greek painted vases surveyed in Walsh's valuable book. Walsh catalogues about 140 of such scenes, marked by caricature drawing styles and irreverent treatment of gods and heroes. Neither the style nor the subject matter of this comic art fits into our traditional conception of the "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" of the Greeks, with the result that ancient visual humor has been sadly understudied. Walsh's book, a revision of his 2004 dissertation at the University of Manchester, is part of a recent trend in scholarship to place the study of ancient comic art on the same plane of respectability as comic literature. Paired with a reading of Alexandre Mitchell's Greek Vase-Painting and the Origins of Visual Humour (Cambridge, 2009), which discusses non-mythological, "everyday" humor, anyone interested in ancient humor will be off to a good start with Walsh's book.

Walsh covers a wide range of vases from the Geometric to the Classical periods, although the majority of the book is devoted to Corinthian komos scenes, Caeretan hydriai, South Italian phlyax vases, skyphoi from the Kabeirion sanctuary in Boetia, the "Sam Wide" vases associated with the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore in Corinth, and a variety of Attic vases with depictions of satyrs or the battle between the pygmies and cranes. Almost all of these groups of vases have been identified by scholars as comic in the past; Walsh's main accomplishment is to bring together this diverse scholarship for the first time and to try to arrive at some comprehensive theories as to why various groups of Greeks might want to produce and use vases which seem to mock their gods.

A few flaws in the methodology somewhat undermine Walsh's accomplishment. First, and most importantly for a field which stills needs to convince skeptics that there is such a thing as ancient visual humor at all, Walsh can be much too optimistic in the identification of both subjects and humorous treatment. For example, Walsh identified an eighth-century b.c.e. Geometric vase with a hunter grasping a bird in the midst of a frieze of other birds as Herakles and the Stymphalian Birds, and suggests that this scene is humorous, since it shows his prey escaping (32). Not even the lack of an illustration—in which the book is surprisingly lacking—can deter the reader from diagnosing this as a variation on the thousands of birds which flutter on Geometric vases, leaving this a humorless scene and almost certainly not Herakles.

Secondly, although Walsh points out that the humorous scenes on vases are not mere reflections of the comic theater, he still believes that theatrical inspiration lies behind the majority of his vases. Thus, while his discussions of the relation of the images to literary works are very thorough, he almost completely neglects to compare the parodic scenes with their models on "serious" painted vases. For instance, one Kaberion vase shows burlesqued versions of the rape of Cassandra and the reunion of Helen and Menelaos. Walsh comments on the obvious humor of Ajax's phallically wielded sword, but if he had compared this scene to the many serious depictions of the subject on Attic vases, he would have seen addition elements of its humor: that the painter has replaced the noble cult statue of Athena with a scrawny rural herm; that Cassandra is clothed and Ajax is nude, reversing the usual schema; and that Helen, instead of fleeing from Menelaos as she unvaryingly does in serious depictions...