NYRB VOLUME 55, NUMBER 12 · JULY 17, 2008

Isn't It Funny?
By Mary Beard

Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes

by Jim Holt
Norton, 141 pp., $15.95

Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power, and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture, 100 BC–AD 250
by John R. Clarke
University of California Press, 322 pp., $55.00

Just over halfway up the Column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome is a memorable, and
unsettling, scene. Although practically invisible from ground level, and almost crowded out
by the images of violent conflict between Roman legions and German tribes which spiral
up the shaft, it has often caught the attention of archaeologists. For it shows a young child
being torn from the arms of his German mother by a Roman soldier—and still reaching out
to her, as he is roughly hauled away.

Most commentators have interpreted this as a stark reminder of the horrors of warfare.
The Column of Marcus, erected at the end of the second century AD, offers a much less
civilized and genial picture of military combat than the more famous Column of Trajan of
some seventy years earlier. Here we see bodies skewered, women abducted and dragged by
their hair, native villages sacked and torched. The seizure of the helpless infant seems to
sum up the grim message of the column as a whole.

It comes as a surprise, then, to discover that Eugen Petersen, director of the German
Archaeological Institute in Rome in the closing years of the nineteenth century and author
of what remains even now the most meticulous publication on the column, took a very
different view. He thought that this scene would have made the Romans laugh, and that it
was in fact a joke (ein Scherz). Though hardly a man renowned for his sense of humor,
Petersen nevertheless saw here not the horror of abduction but fun and games, or light
relief, among the battle lines.

Of course, we cannot now know how any Roman would have reacted to the scene, even
supposing that they could clearly have made it out from the ground below. But either way,
this is a classic example of the problem of studying laughter or humor—the two categories
overlap but are not identical—in any historical period, and especially in one as far distant
as ancient Rome. It is hard not to suspect that Petersen had fallen into the common trap of
imposing his own eccentric idea of what might be funny or humorous on the visual images
of the second century AD. Or alternatively he was using humor as a convenient explanation
for something he found hard to understand. For like "religion" or "ritual," "humor" has
often proved a useful label to pin onto those objects or images from the ancient world
which otherwise seem to defy explanation. If we cannot make sense of it, perhaps it was
religious, or perhaps it was a joke. So the logic goes.

Laughter is one of the most treacherous of all fields of history. Like sex and eating, it is an
absolutely universal human phenomenon, and at the same time something that is highly
culturally and chronologically specific. Every human society in the world laughs, and
whatever their race or language, people make almost exactly the same sound in doing so.
Not only that, but they represent the sound of laughter in almost exactly the same
alphabetic or phonetic form. Whereas Albanian dogs apparently go "ham ham" rather than
"woof woof," and Hungarian pigs go "rof rof rof," not "oink oink," there are few language
communities in the world that do not represent the sound of laughter with some variant on
"ha ha" or "hee hee."

It even extends to primates. Charles Darwin was one of the first to recognize that
Aristotle had been wrong to claim that human beings were the only animals to laugh. And
since then many scholarly hours have been profitably spent tickling the underarms of
chimps, and watching them at play, to confirm that they do indeed laugh exactly like
Homo sapiens. Or very nearly so. The sound of human laughter is made only as we exhale.
Chimp laughter occurs also as they inhale. The difference may (or, of course, may not) be
crucially significant.

Yet things look very different when we go beyond such physical stimuli to reflect on jokes,
cartoons, pictures, and performances that provoke laughter. Never mind what we may
share with the primates; it is often hard for the English to share a joke with their neighbors
across the Channel, or to respond to cartoons penned a century ago. It is all very well for
comedians to claim that "the old ones are the best," but anyone who has picked up a
nineteenth-century copy of a comic magazine such as Punch is almost bound to have been
disappointed. Even when they are not referring to the minutiae of some now forgotten
political crisis, the vast majority of the cartoons simply don't make you laugh. It is
sometimes easy enough, on a few moments' reflection, to get the joke and to see why it
might once have seemed funny; but that is a very long way from feeling the remotest
temptation to laugh oneself. In that sense laughter does not travel across space, time, or
even necessarily—as any encounter with a group of under-fifteens will tell us—between
different age groups in a single community.

So how do we reconcile these two sides of laughter—the biological universal and the
intensely culturally specific? Theorists and scientists have worked on the problem from
both ends. On the one hand, they have shown that laughter from tickling is not quite the
reflex response we often assume it to be. For a start, it is next to impossible to raise a laugh
by tickling yourself (whereas you can easily make your own leg jerk by striking your patella
with a hammer). It is also the case that when tickling happens in threatening rather than
friendly circumstances, it doesn't produce laughter, but screams or tears. Hence the
conclusion that—while there may be some purely biological prompts to laughter (though
not the misnamed "laughing gas," which only produces euphoria)—the link between
tickling and laughing is largely a social one, not a reflex at all. From this stems a range of
theories that go on to explain laughter as the result of evolutionary adaptation within early
society. One idea is that laughing functioned as a "false alarm" device. It was a sign to
primitive hominids that despite all the rumpus that other hominids were creating, this was
no enemy attack but friendly knockabout.

On the other hand, there are all those more familiar theories of the role, function, and
philosophy of the joke. These attempt to show that despite the seemingly baffling variety of
all the other, nonphysical, stimuli to laughter, there is underneath a common point and
rationale to joking and laughing. In Stop Me If You've Heard This (a book about jokes
which has the rare distinction of being at times quite funny—most are deathly serious) Jim
Holt takes a wry look at the main theories, and finds them not entirely up to the task. Or
rather, most theories fit some jokes rather well, but suit others hardly at all.

Most ancient theorists, from Plato and Aristotle on, saw jokes as an expression of
superiority, humor as "mockery and derision," and laughter, therefore, as "a slightly
spiritualized snarl." This is fine, argues Holt, for a range of unpleasant jokes at the expense
of the other races and religions, of the poor or otherwise unfortunate ("How did Helen
Keller burn her fingers? She tried to read a waffle iron"). It also works for the kind of
temporary triumph we might feel if we saw "Bill Gates get hit in the face with a custard
pie." It does not seem up to the task of explaining why we might laugh at puns, for
example. You might conceivably argue that we are there enjoying a sense of superiority
over language itself. "But now," as Holt observes, "the superiority theory has become
elastic to the point of meaninglessness."

More popular among modern theorists is the "incongruity theory" of joking, which sees
humor and laughter stemming from the inappropriate mixing of categories or registers of
meaning ("Work is the curse of the drinking classes," as Oscar Wilde quipped). Or, as Kant
put it more opaquely in the Critique of Judgment, a joke arises "from the sudden
transformation of a strained expectation into nothing." Kant's own example of this was a
story of an Indian who looked astonished when an Englishman opened a bottle of beer and
the contents frothed out. When asked why he was so surprised, the Indian replied, "I'm not
surprised at its getting out, but at how you ever managed to get it all in." The problem here
is not that jokes trade on incongruity, for almost all of them in some way do. It is why
incongruity should give us pleasure, and why some sorts of incongruity prompt laughter
and others (such as Oedipus' parenthood) do not. Besides, as Holt goes on to ask, why
should the reaction either to incongruity or to a feeling of superiority be "a bout of cackling
and chest heaving"?

That is what Freud's famous "relief theory" of jokes accounts for much better. For here
we find a direct connection between the bodily release of laughter and the release, by the
joke, of inhibited thoughts and feelings. Holt gives a simple, light-hearted, but sympathetic
account of the Freudian theory that jokes allow the expression of otherwise forbidden
impulses—including not only sex and aggression but, in the case of nonsense jokes, the
impulse to "play" which adults, unlike children, tend to repress. So far, so good. But Holt
finds himself unconvinced here too. Never mind whether all jokes release what is repressed
(which is, after all, as unfalsifiable a claim as you could make); the logic of Freud's position
ought to mean that those "who laugh the hardest at lewd jokes should be the ones who are
the most sexually repressed." That is the reverse of what we observe. Other studies have
shown—what most amateurs have observed anyway—that it is the least inhibited who
enjoy dirty jokes the most.

In the end Holt remains a witty and engaging agnostic on the theory of jokes. An insider in
the world of humor and a self-proclaimed collector of jokes (whatever exactly that
involves), he tests out those who would theorize about his trade, and finds them interesting
but wanting. For Holt, laughter is both simpler and more complicated than its best-known
theorists would have it. It also has a history stretching back to the ancient world, which
he breezes through in the first part of the Stop Me If You've Heard This.

This is a very funny tale and it produces some marvelous and unlikely heroes: Nat
Schmulowitz, famous more widely for successfully defending Fatty Arbuckle on a murder
charge, but for Holt best known as a "heroic collector" of joking ephemera; Poggio
Bracciolini, superstar fifteenth-century humanist and compiler of the first modern
Western joke book; and best of all, Gershon Legman, the inventor of the slogan "Make
Love, Not War" (or so he claimed), book-sourcer for Alfred Kinsey, and author of
Rationale of the Dirty Joke and its companion, dirtier, volume, No Laughing Matter. Holt
tends, however, to be reticent on the ancient history of joking. With just a walk-on part for
Palamedes, the mythical inventor of the joke (as well as of the alphabet, the lighthouse,
dice, and a number of other essentials of human civilization), and another for the
Philogelos ("Laughter-Lover"), a fourth- or fifth-century AD compilation of more than
two hundred jokes, the laughter of Greece and Rome is covered in a few pages.

With good reason. The problem here is not merely those various competing and vaguely
unsatisfactory theories of laughter, or the difficulty of applying them to a culture of two
thousand years ago. We have, in fact, only a very patchy knowledge of when, in what
contexts, and (as the story of Eugen Peterson and the column illustrates) at what Greeks
and Romans laughed. In the Roman world, I know of only one instance when we can follow
in detail the story of a laugh, and share something of its physical experience.

The laugher in question is Dio Cassius, historian and Roman senator. During the reign of
the emperor Commodus (180–192 AD), the terrible son of Marcus Aurelius, Dio attended
the games in the Colosseum, where (not wholly unlike the scenes recreated in the movie
Gladiator) the emperor himself was performing. He had scored a number of victories
against animals (comparatively safely, since the particularly fierce ones were presented to
him in nets), and had just succeeded in decapitating an ostrich. Dio himself was sitting
with the other senators in the front row and gives an eyewitness account of what happened
next:

He came up to where we were sitting, carrying the head in his left hand and in his right
hand holding up his bloody sword. He spoke not a word, yet he wagged his head with a
grin, indicating that he would treat us in the same way. And many would indeed have
perished by the sword on the spot, for laughing at him (for it was laughter rather than
indignation that overcame us), if I had not chewed some laurel leaves, which I got from
my garland, myself, and persuaded the others who were sitting near me to do the same, so
that in the steady movement of our jaws we might conceal the fact that we were laughing.

Whatever theory of laughter we choose to adopt, the combination of fear, embarrassment,

and almost irrepressible giggles is one that must be recognized by almost everyone, even
across all those centuries. We can feel for, and with, Dio. We all have at some time in our
lives bitten on the modern equivalent of laurel wreaths.

But this is a rare, more or less unique, case. Elsewhere it is much harder to tune in to
Roman laughter. We do not know how much the Roman audience actually laughed at
"comedies" on stage, or which lines were deemed the funniest. Most theater directors who
have produced Roman comedy for a modern audience (or the Greek classics of
Aristophanes for that matter) will explain what a lot of innuendo and staging devices
they had to add to the bare text to elicit much laughter. And this is borne out by the
experience of teaching. Although students may enjoy the wit of Ovid, or feel some
satisfaction in reading the squibs of Martial, the only work of Latin literature that can be
guaranteed to raise a laugh is the Apocolocyntosis (the "Pumpkinification of the emperor
Claudius"). Sometimes attributed to the philosopher Seneca, this is a skit on the old and
doddery Claudius, making his way up to heaven in his attempt to become a god.

It is an unusually modern piece of political satire—as well as a reassuring hint that some
Romans, at least, found the whole idea of emperors becoming gods after their death as
strange as we do. One particular favorite passage describes Claudius' approach to the gates
of heaven, shambling, muttering to himself, and wagging his gray head. The gods conclude
that it is not a man but a monster, so dispatch Hercules, who at first mistakes the dead
emperor for his thirteenth labor. Disaster is averted, however, when Hercules opens his
mouth and speaks in Homeric Greek. Claudius instantly celebrates the fact that
Mount Olympus appears to be populated by philologists.

Holt does not mention the Apocolocyntosis. And on the rest of the ancient material he is
not just brief, but cautious. Even when he is discussing the Philogelos, he stops short of
ever saying that the jokes in it are funny. They may be "spare and pointed" ("'How shall I
cut your hair?' a talkative barber asked a wag. 'In silence!'"). They may conjure up a
wonderful cast of ancient characters, such as the "absent-minded professor," the
notoriously stupid people of the city of Abdera, or "the man with bad breath." But the fact
that the one he likes best has lost its punch line (it starts with an Abderite asking a eunuch
how many children he has) probably indicates where Holt's sympathies lie. Sadly he misses
the one case where, for once, the old jokes really are the best. He quotes an "excellent" joke
from Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious:

A royal personage was making a tour through his provinces and noticed a man in the
crowd who bore a striking resemblance to his own exalted person. He beckoned to him and
asked: "Was your mother at one time in service in the Palace?" "No, your Highness," was
the reply, "but my father was."
Neither Freud nor Holt seem to have spotted that the first surviving version of this is to be
found among a small collection of the jokes of the first emperor Augustus, in a chapter of
Macrobius' Saturnalia.

If ancient written humor is hard to grasp, visual humor—often with no written

commentary at all—is even more tricky. We know that Greeks and Romans laughed at
paintings. In fact, one anecdote had it that the fifth-century-BC Greek painter Zeuxis had
actually died of laughing at one of his own pictures—of an old woman (a nice reflection, I
suppose, both of ancient misogyny and of Zeuxis' famous skill at realistic representation).
But by and large, finding humor in ancient art comes down to trying to detect it in the
images themselves. Hence the difficulties of Eugen Petersen.

John R. Clarke's Looking at Laughter is a brave and sometimes brilliant attempt to do just
the kind of detective work that is now rare. Clarke has a wonderful eye for the byways of
Roman art and a passionate determination to get his readers to look beyond the
mainstream of formal, official Roman image-making. Here he has resurrected all kinds of
paintings and ceramics, mainly from Pompeii and Ostia, which do not usually find much of
a place in the modern scholarly literature, even if in some cases they are tourist favorites.

These include, for example, a wonderful visual parody of gods and myths from the House
of the Menander at Pompeii (in which a hunchback dwarf Theseus is dispatching the
Minotaur, and a nastily misshapen Venus gets little Cupid to fire his arrows at Jupiter);
scene after scene of cavorting pygmies (whether boating around the Nile, being eaten by a
hippopotamus, or— in one strange incident—apparently reenacting the story of the
Judgment of Solomon); and phalli in every imaginable, and some scarcely imaginable, size
and form (perched over bread ovens, with bells and wings, in the act of turning into a dog,
or being weighed against a large sack of gold). It would be almost impossible not to follow
Clarke and to conclude that at least some of this was funny. We would surely be missing
the joke if we treated it all as if there was no humorous intention behind it.

Clarke briefly surveys theories of laughter, choosing a somewhat different set from Holt.
Here we learn not only of Freudian theory and the release inhibition (a rather more
technical and nuanced account than Holt's, it must be said). We read also of laughter as a
social survival mechanism ("laughter saves the day in a host of social situations where
confrontation threatens survival, sexual dominance, or status within the group"), of
laughter as a mechanism to avert the "Evil Eye," and of laughter as part of
carnivalesque transgression, à la Mikhail Bakhtin (which is Clarke's preferred
model).

He also has a hilarious chapter on what modern scholars have done with images of this
type—or, as he puts it, "the lengths to which a philologist or ancient historian might go to
raise the brow from low to high." Choosing a fresco from the façade of a Pompeian shop
which depicts an ass mounting a lion and a figure of Victory crowning the triumphant ass,
he reviews the various academic interpretations which, in their different ways, have
managed to turn a blind eye to the ludicrous sexual topsy-turvy of the scene. One
particularly opaque analysis relates it to a modern Sicilian folk tale about an ass and a lion
trying to cross a river together. Another reads it as a visual metaphor for the victory at the
Battle of Actium in 31 BC of Octavian, the ass, over Mark Antony, who had used the image
of a lion on some of his coins—so transforming "an embarrassingly dirty sexual image into
an almost clean allegory of a historical event."

Clarke presents an extremely powerful case overall. But there still remains a gap between
the recognition that some of these images would have prompted laughter, intentionally or
not, and deciding exactly which ones were funny and with what effect. Very often the
criteria we apply depend on our own prejudices, internal censors, and sense of humor
rather than the Romans'. Like any enthusiast, Clarke does tend to find what he is looking
for. I, for one, remain far from convinced (pace Bakhtin) that "transgressive" sexual acts
are "therefore funny," or that the sexual images in the changing rooms in the Suburban
Baths at Pompeii were intended to provoke a laugh from the naked bather to dispel "the
Evil Eye of the envious man who has been eying his handsome body." And I still suspect
that those famous Pompeiian mosaics of the "unswept floor" (showing left-over food, as if
casually dropped) were intended to impress viewers with their realism as much as appeal
to their sense of humor.

Looking at Laughter is, in other words, a wonderful book. But just occasionally I felt that I
was in the company of a rather jollier version of Herr Petersen.