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What made the Romans laugh? Was ancient Rome a carnival, filled with practical jokes and hearty chuckles? Or was it a carefully regulated culture in which the uncontrollable excess of laughter was a force to fear—a world of wit, irony, and knowing smiles? How did Romans make sense of laughter? What role did it play in the world of the law courts, the imperial palace, or the spectacles of the arena?
Laughter in Ancient Rome explores one of the most intriguing, but also trickiest, of historical subjects. Drawing on a wide range of Roman writing—from essays on rhetoric to a surviving Roman joke book—Mary Beard tracks down the giggles, smirks, and guffaws of the ancient Romans themselves. From ancient “monkey business” to the role of a chuckle in a culture of tyranny, she explores Roman humor from the hilarious, to the momentous, to the surprising. But she also reflects on even bigger historical questions. What kind of history of laughter can we possibly tell? Can we ever really “get” the Romans’ jokes?
- Sales Rank: #371156 in Books
- Published on: 2015-09-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.90" h x 1.00" w x 5.80" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
Review
"'Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up, ' which has just been published, is an engaging exploration of what made the Romans laugh--bad breath, among other things--but it also explores dimensions of Roman sensibility that have become elusive to us."--Rebecca Mead"New Yorker" (09/01/2014)
"Expect to be engaged by an enthralling book."--Harry Mount"The Spectator" (06/07/2014)
"Superbly acute and unashamedly complex. . . . To our vision of the solemn grandeur that was Rome, she restores a raucous, ghostly laughter."--Iona McLaren"The Telegraph" (07/01/2014)
"Written in Beard's trademark combination of erudition and effortless prose, Laughter in Ancient Rome is a fascinating combination of history, psychology, linguistic exploration and humor. This is scholarly writing at its best."--Pamela Toler"Shelf Awareness for Readers" (07/01/2014)
"You can read hundreds of books on Roman emperors and conquests; this represents a valiant attempt to bring a little understanding of a smaller, but no less important, part of what made Rome run."--Rob Hardy"Columbus Commercial Dispatch" (07/21/2014)
"Rich and provocative."--Roy Gibson"TLS" (08/13/2014)
"Like a great piece of archaeology, 'Laughter in Ancient Rome' allows us to glimpse ourselves in the cracked mirror of a distant culture."--John Domini"Washington Post" (09/17/2014)
"What made the Romans laugh? It's an incredible, almost childlike thought to have. But in this characteristically brilliant book by Mary Beard, this simple thought becomes a mental projection that conjures up the world of Rome as well or better than any book in recent memory."--Jonathon Sturgeon"Flavorwire" (12/03/2014)
'Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up, ' which has just been published, is an engaging exploration of what made the Romans laugh bad breath, among other things but it also explores dimensions of Roman sensibility that have become elusive to us."--Rebecca Mead"New Yorker" (09/01/2014)"
"Few things are more tiresome than seeing a joke analyzed. . . . Beard s book avoids pedantry but also its opposite, the archness that preens itself on 'not taking humor too seriously' and signals inane wordplays with 'pun intended!' More importantly, her treatment makes one look with new eyes . . . even at works she does not herself discuss . . . [a] stimulating book."
--Gregory Hays"New York Review of Books" (07/10/2014)"
"[Beard] makes the Romans come alive and through them, gets readers to ponder that most fundamental and uniquely human facility laughter. The phenomenal Ms. Beard has written another cracking book, one of her best, I think."--Yasmin Alibhai-Brown"The Independent" (05/29/2014)"
"What made the Romans laugh? It s an incredible, almost childlike thought to have. But in this characteristically brilliant book by Mary Beard, this simple thought becomes a mental projection that conjures up the world of Rome as well or better than any book in recent memory."--Jonathon Sturgeon"Flavorwire" (12/03/2014)"
"A fun read . . . accessible yet academic."--Sarah"Norfolk Bookworm" (04/27/2015)
"This is a very sensible, readable, and useful volume. . . . A valuable contribution to scholarship on a difficult topic."--Kristina Milnor"Bryn Mawr" (10/18/2015)
"Beard has posed excellent questions about Roman laughter . . . Her engaging style of writing draws the reader into the discussion. . . . A must read."--John R. Clarke"American Historical Review" (12/01/2015)
From the Inside Flap
“Laughter in Ancient Rome is a masterwork, simultaneously a sophisticated work of historical and literary scholarship and an unputdownable read. Beard never loses sight of the specificities of Roman culture, yet she encompasses an extraordinary range of ancient and modern theorizing. Her book will appeal to psychologists and anthropologists, as well as to classicists and indeed anyone who has ever thought about the much-debated question of why we laugh.”
—William V. Harris, William R. Shepherd Professor of History at Columbia University, and author of Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity
“With a bounty of suggestive and unfailingly intelligent conclusions about the situation of laughter within ancient Roman culture, Beard’s remarkable learning is displayed on every page. Laughter in Ancient Rome is unmistakably a work of scholarship, but it is also an unpretentious and inviting exploration available to anyone who is interested. As a literary attainment, this book is marvelous.”
—Dylan Sailor, Associate Professor of Classics at University of California, Berkeley
About the Author
Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at Cambridge University. Her many books include The Roman Triumph and The Fires of Vesuvius.
Most helpful customer reviews
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Trying to Understand Ancient Laughter
By Rob Hardy
Here’s one that had them laughing in the olden times. “Doctor,” says the patient, “whenever I get up from my sleep, for half an hour, I feel dizzy, and then I’m all right.” And the doctor says, “Get up half an hour later.” This joke worked in ancient Rome 2000 years ago; I hadn’t heard it before, but it reminds me of, “Doctor, it hurts when I do _this_,” and the doctor says, “Then don’t do that.” I bet that second one would have had them rolling in the aisles at the Colosseum, too. But most of the stuff of laughter in _Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up_ (University of California Press) I didn’t find funny, and Mary Beard has good explanations for why what amused the Romans often fails to amuse us. So her book isn’t particularly funny, and that’s not surprising; Beard is able to write with wit and good humor, but she is a serious classicist with scads of books and papers to her name. Even with all her erudition, she has to remind us repeatedly that there is much that we do not understand about Roman society, language, and humor. You can read hundreds of books on Roman emperors and conquests; this represents a valiant attempt to bring a little understanding of a smaller, but no less important, part of what made Rome run.
Roman writers reflected Aristotelian thought about laughter, and Cicero had ideas about humor that showed the sort of split view Romans had of it. Cicero taught that there was little worse than an orator going for a laugh just for the sake of it. The Romans seem to have had a great deal of worry that the one who makes the joke could also be thought the butt of it. The subjects of jokes that made the Romans laugh will often strike us as strange. Suetonius writes of Caligula, “At one of his more lavish banquets he suddenly collapsed into a fit of guffaws. The consuls who were reclining next to him asked him politely why he was laughing. ‘Only at the idea that at one nod from me, both of you could have your throats cut instantly.’” Perhaps they laughed nervously in response; Caligula did find good fun in murdering people. Baldness was an easy instigator for laughter; to joke about blindness was to go too far, but baldness seemed a height of risibility. Julius Caesar’s baldness was a source of jokes, and he knew it, and practiced a form of comb-over, or wore his laurel leaves just so. But when Caesar came triumphantly back in 46 BCE, a ribald song ran, “Romans, lock up your wives. The bald adulterer’s back in town.” Then there was the knee-slapper “about the man from Abdera who saw a runner being crucified and quipped, ‘He’s no longer running, but flying.’” Beard notes that this one, like other jokes, now seems less funny “because of an unbridgeable gap between some of antiquity’s conventions of joking and our own. Crucifixion, for example, does not have a big part in the modern comic repertoire.” Another source of our lack of understanding has to be context, which at this distance we can never fully comprehend. There are those who say, for instance, that the famous mosaic of a chained dog at the house of the tragic poet, with the menacing motto _CAVE CANEM_ was not really a warning, but a joke that the dog was only a picture of a dog. I guess you just had to be there.
Beard admits, “The laughter of the past is always likely to frustrate our most determined efforts to systematize and control it. Anyone who - with a straight face - claims to be able to offer a clear account of why or how or when Romans laughed is bound to be oversimplifying.” Even so, she provokes us into thinking that perhaps the Romans invented the joke. “I have become increasingly convinced that the reason we can laugh along with the ancient Romans is because it is from them that - in part at least - we have learned _how_ to laugh and what to laugh _at_.” This is particularly clear in some of the selections she draws from a Roman joke book, the _Philogelos_ (“laughter lover”). The book was the source of a stand-up routine for a modern British comedian a few years ago, and part of the fun was that the audience was laughing at itself for laughing at jokes that were probably old when they were first written down two millennia ago. But the span of time might be a minimal obstruction. Some collections of humor include the story of Enoch Powell, a politician and wit, who replied to a chatty barber’s, “How shall I cut your hair, sir?” with the reply, “In silence.” It’s not Powell’s original joke, but maybe he especially enjoyed that he knew where it came from and those who repeated the story about him did not. He was a classicist himself, and the joke is from _Philogelos_.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
A funny thing happened on my way......
By JGT
Normally, dissecting what makes us laugh is as distant from humor as dissecting a human body is from cuddling. All the parts of a joke can be labelled and parsed, or the nerves can be traced to their endings in the skin, but the result merely indicate a way to look at humor or affection, thus removing you to a point distant from the reality of either state. Normally. But in Mary Beard's book, Laughter in Ancient Rome, the dissection is done with such innate wit and verve that, while we may not slap our knees and guffaw while reading this beautifully written and impeccably researched essay, we are led gently, with affection, toward a greater understanding of what makes those ancestral jokesters our absolute kin.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
An Interesting, but not Humorous, History of Laughter in Rome and Greece
By William Carpenter
Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up (Sather Classical Lectures) by Mary Beard has two parts. The first is a scholarly consideration of what laughter signifies and the difficulties of recovering what it meant in ancient times - with an emphasis on Greek and Latin sources. The second part of the book is a bit more lively with considerations of what the ancient Romans found humorous. She concludes that the Romans invented the joke (more or less) and that we still find some of them funny because their jokes have influenced what Europeans find funny two thousand years later.
Beard is excellent in handling the source material and discussing the many problems of textual analysis and translation. She also demonstrates why it is so difficult to analyze humor or to figure out what people laugh. This is a surprisingly knotty problem that has defeated writers since Aristotle.
Let me conclude with two minor things that I found disappointing. The book includes a few illustrations. Surprisingly, for a book published in 2014, these are grouped together in a few pages between the two main parts of the book and reproduced in rather fuzzy black and white. Is it really so expensive to include a few color illustrations? The book also has many notes, as is appropriate for a serious history book. Many of these notes give the full Greek or Latin text under discussion. Beard is very helpful about translating Greek and Latin quotes in the body of the book; I wish she had also done translations of the passages in the notes.
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