Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up by Mary Beard (review)

As Beard engagingly admits, this book was “in some ways an impossible project” (78). The first part (Chapters 1 through 4) is more theoretical, dealing with such questions as, Can nonhuman animals laugh? Do all humans share certain ways of expressing laughter—for example, a sound such as English-language speakers write as “ha ha” or the Roman poet Terence as “hahahae”? Are there universal ways of joking, like puns or deliberate misunderstandings? The second part (Chapters 5 through 8) is a more specific study of particular instances of “Roman laughter.” Beard defines Roman broadly to include the earliest works to survive complete in Latin—the comedies of Plautus and Terence—as well as the writings of Cicero, the second-century African Apuleius, and the late antique or medieval “joke-book” entitled the “Laughter Lover” (Philogelos).

Beard has avoided the double danger of killing the subject by solemnity and cheapening it with excessive quotation of ancient jokes. The eighty-plus pages of endnotes and bibliography mark this book as a serious study of Roman laughter, wide-ranging, deeply thought, and extensively researched. It represents a trend in classical studies, a kind of “neurological turn,” which has prompted research into such subjects as dreams and emotions that once seemed beyond investigation.

Certain themes stand out. One is the difficulty of accessing “Roman” laughter: When, for instance, the senator Cassius Dio chewed laurel leaves in order not to laugh at Emperor Commodus cutting off the head of an ostrich, at what was he laughing? Another intriguing theme is the distinctness of Roman, as opposed to Greek, laughter. The Romans had many more words than the Greeks to express the idea of laughing (Beard contends that the word usually translated as “smile,” subridere, actually means “laugh”). Hence she concludes with the suggestion that “it was indeed ‘the Romans’ who invented ‘the joke’” (209).

There are many excellent discussions along the way, one being the famous laugh of the child in Vergil’s Fourth Eclogue. There are also some problems. One of them Beard confronts squarely—the difficulty of defining Roman. What is Roman, for instance, about the Philogelos, written in Greek and compiled in late antiquity or the Middle Ages? Beard proposes that Romans “commodified” jokes (208), because the first reference to a joke collection is in Plautus’ Stichus, a play known to have been adapted from a Greek original. The opening of Aristophanes’ Frogs shows that fifth-century Athenians were perfectly familiar with stock jokes, even if not with joke books.

It might also be argued that Beard has made jokes and joking too central to her study of laughter. As Cassius Dio’s stifled laughter shows, not to mention many scenes in Roman comedy, Greeks and Romans laughed at situations and not only at jokes. Nonetheless, Beard’s careful and responsible study shows that investigating Roman laughter was not “an impossible project,” but it was no laughing matter either.