Laughter in Ancient Rome (7 page)

Who can know? This brisk dismissal may do Aristotle an injustice. But it is certainly hard to resist the conclusion that the loss of the second book of the
Poetics
(assuming, of course, that there was one) has contributed to its modern fame and exaggerated its ancient significance. We are dealing here with a powerful combination of our own emotional investment in those tantalizing books that have slipped through the net and—let’s be honest—the convenience (in the absence of any firm evidence) of being able to reconstruct an Aristotelian view to suit our own various purposes. Indeed it may well be, as Silk again has hinted, that the “theory of comedy” in the
Poetics
owes much more to the inventive zeal of modern Aristotelians than to the mixed bag of observations and aperçus that Aristotle himself offered. The plain fact is that they are lost.
³¹

If we focus instead on Aristotle’s remarks on laughter that do survive, we get a very different impression from that which is often presented, and again much more of a mixed bag. For they include plenty of ideas
about
laughter but nothing that remotely approaches a theory
of
laughter—in the sense of a coherent explanatory model, a defined methodology, and a panoply of argument directed at the subject in hand. Aristotle certainly had powerful and systematic theories of other topics, but there is no sign of that in the case of laughter.
³²
His longest discussion on the subject occupies a couple of modern pages in the
Nicomachean Ethics,
where he advocates, as so often, the virtuous middle way between two extremes. To be “well-turned” or “witty” (
eutrapelos
) is a desirable characteristic of a “gentleman” (as the Greek
eleutheros
is conventionally, but awkwardly, translated). Too much joking is the mark of a “buffoon” (
bōmolochos
), too little the mark of a “boor” (
agroikos
): both are to be avoided.
³³
But the two main elements of what has become known as “the classical theory of laughter” are found elsewhere.

The claim that human beings are the only animals that laugh is a subsidiary argument in Aristotle’s discussion of the human body, in particular the role of the diaphragm. In a perilously circular explanation, he asserts that the fact that “humans alone are susceptible to tickling is due (a) to the fineness of their skin and (b) to their being the only living things that laugh.” There is in this no suggestion that laughter is a distinguishing property of the human being. Despite the popular assumption about this aspect of his “theory,” he is certainly not defining man as “the animal that laughs.”
³⁴

The other claim, that laughter is a form of derision and a display of superiority, is more complicated. It derives in part from the discussion in the
Nicomachean Ethics
where Aristotle refers to some forms of joking (
skōmma
) as “a kind of abuse” or “a reproach” (
loidorēma ti
).
³⁵
But in its popular form, it is drawn mainly from two passages in two different treatises. In the first, surviving book of the
Poetics,
he has a few words to say, in passing, on the subject of comedy: “A representation of people worse than us, not in the full sense of bad, but what we laugh at, is a subdivision of the ugly/shameful [
tou aischrou
]. The laughable is some kind of fault and ugliness/shame [
aischos
] that involves no pain or harm—such as, obviously, a comic mask [literally a ‘laughable face,’
geloion prosōpon
], which is ugly [
aischron
] and distorted but free of pain.”
³⁶
This is often put together with a second passage, from Aristotle’s
Rhetoric,
where he discusses the character of different groups of an orator’s potential audience (for without knowing what his listeners are like, the orator will never successfully persuade them). The young, Aristotle explains, are fickle, passionate, argumentative, and highly principled; also, “they are fond of laughter, and therefore witty [
eutrapeloi
]. For wit is educated insolence [
pepaidumenē hubris
].”
³⁷

It is hard to know how exactly to translate these passages, or to know what point Aristotle was trying to make. The key extract from the
Poetics
raises all kinds of questions. What kind of fault—moral or physical (shame or ugliness?)—underlies the laughable? Whose pain, or lack of it, does Aristotle have in mind? What implications does this discussion of comic drama have for laughter off the stage?
³⁸
The other passage, from the
Rhetoric,
is even more puzzling, largely because of the strange oxymoron, even “joke,” in the phrase “educated insolence” (
pepaidumenē hubris
). For, as critics have often seen,
hubris
(which can mean anything from “excess” through “outrage” to “violence” or “rape”) cannot be “educated,” but that very word
pepaidumenē
has, in any case, an ambiguous root,
paid-,
which signifies both “education” and “childishness” or “play.”
³⁹
What is Aristotle trying to say about wit, apart from being witty himself?

It is clearer what is he not saying. First, there is rather less about derision than is usually supposed. It is true that creative translation can turn his definition of wit into “educated
abuse
,” but the famous lines from the
Poetics
—though they refer to the subject of laughter as being “some kind of fault” and so suggest an element of derision—explicitly reject the idea of pain; there is no reason to see “scoffing” here.
⁴⁰

Second, even though some of these passages do share an interest in laughter prompted by ridicule (or laughter at another’s expense), Aristotle certainly does not suggest that this is laughter’s only cause, function, or stylistic register. If he were suggesting that, he would have been a very poor reader of Greek literature and culture, in which (
pace
Skinner’s assertion that it was a completely “foreign” notion) there was plenty of “good-natured laughter.”
⁴¹
In fact, Aristotle himself, in another passage in the
Rhetoric,
explicitly places laughter and the laughable into the class of “pleasant things.” Whatever exactly he may have meant by this, it has seemed so incompatible with the idea of derision that several editors of the text have rejected it as a later addition—not by Aristotle.
⁴²

The fact is that Aristotle’s ideas about laughter were numerous and not necessarily mutually compatible. One sixth-century commentary on a philosophical textbook (
The Introduction
) by Porphyry even states that Aristotle in his
History of Animals
claimed that man was not the only animal to laugh: herons did too. True or not (and the laughter of the heron is found in no text of Aristotle that we still possess), he approached the subject from a variety of angles, and his views cannot be reduced, or elevated, to a single, systematic “classical theory of laughter.”
⁴³

It is also important to underline that there was almost certainly a much looser link than is often assumed between this diverse Aristotelian theorizing and later Roman writing about laughter. Roman theorists were not wholly dependent on what Aristotle had said before, or on the works of his immediate followers. With these, we confront the problem of loss on an even bigger scale than with the second book of the
Poetics.
Almost none of the key texts of Aristotle’s Peripatetic successors between the fourth and second centuries BCE survive, beyond a few sentences and some disputed titles. This makes it impossible to prove that they are not the source for any individual claim we may find in Roman discussions. But the signs are that—in laughter as in so many other areas—there was significant Roman input into the dialogue with earlier Greek thought. The argument that laughter is a property of man may even have been an innovation of writers of the Roman period, developing Aristotle’s almost casual observation that (leaving aside the possible distraction of the heron) man is the only animal that laughs. At least, we find that theory regularly in Roman imperial writers—and never in earlier surviving literature.

In the words of Porphyry, for example, writing in Greek in the third century CE, “Even if a man does not always laugh, he is said to be laughing not in that he always laughs but that he is of such a nature as to laugh—and this holds of him always, being connatural, like neighing of horses. And they say that these are properties in the strict sense, because they convert: if horse, neighing; and if neighing, horse.” Or, as Porphyry implies: if man, laughing; and if laughing, man.
⁴⁴
For obvious reasons, this became a very loaded set of ideas in the controversies of early Christian theology, for if Jesus were known to have laughed, that would have major implications for those crucial debates about how his status—divine or human—was to be defined. Indeed, this is an issue that animates and divides Eco’s fictional monks in
The Name of the Rose:
Did Jesus laugh, or didn’t he?
⁴⁵

More generally, Roman discussions of laughter are only rarely a precise match for the Aristotelian theories that do survive in the works of Aristotle. It is clear enough, for example, that Pliny’s views on tickling are Aristotelian in a broad sense, focusing on the role of the diaphragm in the production of laughter. But it is equally clear that Pliny’s account is significantly different from the version of tickling in
On the Parts of Animals:
Pliny suggests that it is direct irritation of the diaphragm that raises a laugh; Aristotle had argued instead that it was the heat generated by the irritation that actually produced the laughter. Pliny also has a different view from Aristotle on the first occurrence of a baby’s laughter (Pliny’s babies do not laugh at all until forty days old, while Aristotle’s laugh and weep while asleep), and it was surely somewhere else that Pliny picked up that story about Zoroaster, which is found in Iranian sources as well. To claim that all Pliny’s variants derive from some lost Peripatetic follower of Aristotle would be a mere act of faith.
⁴⁶

Much the same is true of Cicero’s discussion of laughter in
On the Orator.
This contains some material almost certainly derived from the Aristotelian tradition (Aristotle had, for example, already highlighted “incongruity” as a cause of laughter
⁴⁷
). But most recent investigations of this dialogue have identified much less Demetrius of Phaleron (and his elusive, possibly nonexistent, treatise
On the Laughable
) and many more Roman elements, themes, and theories than was once thought. In fact, one of the main distinctions that structures Cicero’s argument—that between
cavillatio
(extended humor) and
dicacitas
(immediate witticisms)—seems to have little to do with anything we can find (or reconstruct) in earlier Greek works on the subject: these were, in Elaine Fantham’s words, “old-fashioned Roman terms” making “a Roman distinction.”
⁴⁸

I shall come back to the relationship between Greek and Roman laughter, in both theory and practice, in chapter 4. At this point let me emphasize two important tenets that underpin the rest of this book. First, there is no such thing as “the Aristotelian theory of laughter,” or at least not in those precise terms. Aristotle generated all kinds of ideas about laughter, a range of speculations and aperÇus on aspects of the subject as diverse as tickling, the mechanisms of jokes, comedy, derision, the role of laughter in social life, and the importance of play. But there is no reason to suppose that Aristotle developed a systematic theory of laughter, or even that he necessarily saw laughter as a unitary phenomenon and field of inquiry.

Second, however influential some of Aristotle’s views were (and they certainly were influential), they did not delimit ancient approaches to laughter, still less did they amount to anything that might be called “
the
classical approach to laughter.” In both Greece and Rome, views about laughter multiplied and took root—some more strongly than others—in many different contexts, from the philosophical schools (for it was not only the Peripatetics who had things to say on laughter
⁴⁹
) to the emperor’s dinner table, from the rhetorical classroom to the bar and the brothel. To put it simply, there was—as we have already glimpsed—a lot of very varied talk about laughter in antiquity.