Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up (Volume 71) (Sather Classical Lectures) by Mary Beard (PDF)

Description

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?

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: 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.” ― New Yorker”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.” ― New York Review of Books”[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.” ― Independent”Superbly acute and unashamedly complex. . . . To our vision of the solemn grandeur that was Rome, she restores a raucous, ghostly laughter.” ― Telegraph”Like a great piece of archaeology, Laughter in Ancient Rome allows us to glimpse ourselves in the cracked mirror of a distant culture.” ― Washington Post”Expect to be engaged by an enthralling book.” ― Spectator”Rich and provocative.” ― Times Literary Supplement”[Beard’s] central question is simple: what made the Romans laugh? Her answers are pleasingly complex. . . . Beard is always enlightening, and writes with a perfect balance of forensic detail and wide-ranging intellect.” ― Scotsman”Laughter in Ancient Rome is never dull. Beard’s tone is conversational throughout, and it’s almost as if the reader gets to experience a little of what she’s like as a lecturer.” ― Irish Independent”This is a very sensible, readable, and useful volume. . . . A valuable contribution to scholarship on a difficult topic.” ― Bryn Mawr Classical Review”Wide-ranging, deeply thought, and extensively researched.” ― Journal of Interdisciplinary History”Beard discusses theories of humor, power relationships, evolutionary psychology and much more in Laughter in Ancient Rome.” ― Scientific American”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.” ― Columbus Commercial Dispatch”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.” ― Flavorwire”Laughter in Ancient Rome is a book that is filled with good sense and sound scholarship. It is a worthy successor to the previous published volumes of the Sather lectures.” ― HermathenaBeard’s ability to draw together a wide array of ancient and modern references in her discussions is impressive… Laughter in Ancient Rome succeeds in leading sympathetic readers on a stimulating journey through Roman “laughterhood”. ― Phoenix”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.” ― Shelf Awareness for Readers”Beard has posed excellent questions about Roman laughter . . . Her engaging style of writing draws the reader into the discussion. . . . A must read.” ― American Historical Review 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 From the Back Cover “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. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐In the fall of 2008, noted classicist Mary Beard gave the Sather (Classical) Lectures at Berkeley. Those lectures, and five years subsequent thinking over what she said there led to this book, and a fine piece of scholarship it is. Starting from the question, what made Romans laugh, she discusses a range of topics: what is laughter for? And what is humor –joking among its most prominent forms—for? Especially what role did joking play in status and power obsessed classical Rome? How transgressive and aggressive was Roman humor and laughter at different times during the imperiate? How much did Roman views on the role of laughter and of humor descend from Greek views and where was it different? In the brilliant penultimate chapter she meditates on an ancient compendium of jokes, the Philogelos (it contains “some 265 jokes”), and asks: did Rome invent the idea of the joke as an exchangeable commodity? (Almost every other aspect of Roman life was commodified.)Her observations on all these topics are carefully considered, weighed with ambiguity at times as is fitting on the study of texts so distant in time and mores from ours, and corrupted, even lost, in their transmission from scribe to scribe. Indeed, one of the most fascinating lessons of this rich study is how complicated it is to tease meaning from ancient artifacts and thus how provisional any conclusions reached from study must be. There are widely variant texts, missing parts, in some cases only fragments left or even less, just descriptions of the texts in other writers’ equally fragmentary works. Scribes have made grievous mistakes in transcribing, to the point that whole passages no longer make sense. Words are so badly written down as to be indecipherable. Beard cautions other scholars to move carefully in emending or filling in content in order to make obscure texts clearer: the risk of distortion is great. Some meaning we will just not uncover this far past when the texts were initially composed.This is a sage and very interesting book and for so specialized a topic and approach, one that will probably be read widely in scholarly circles. (It’s already been praised in the London Times Literary Section and in the New York Review of Books.) It requires careful attention while reading: the points she makes require detailed analysis of words and passages as well as sometimes extended discussion of other scholars’ interpretations.As to the secondary literature on her chosen subject, she seems to have read virtually everything, and her grasp of the primary sources is wide, catholic and inventive. She is generous in her judgment of her peers. (Because I had the opportunity to hear him speak a few years back and later to review a book by him, I noted especially her approving treatment of Simon Critchley’s work on laughter and joking.)

⭐I am a big fan of Mary Beard’s work and the title promised an interesting contribution to our understanding of Roman life. This anticipation was further enhanced by the book jacket blurb that the work was not academic but accessible to the general reader. Unfortunately, I found the work disappointing and after a few pages of reading, I decided to skim the book to see if I couldn’t find something interesting in it. Admittedly, this means the review here is limited in that I may have missed something along the way.First of all, the book relies heavily on classical literature, which, being the gospel according to the literati, may reflect an etherial perspective rather than one from the ground. On the Romans as a whole, I can make three observations. First, laughter and laughing does not appear very important to their society. This is evidenced by the fact that Latin vocabulary has few word to describe laughter. As Beard points, our own language is much richer in this regard (I will add that Arabic has a full range of words for camel, capturing their gender, color and other characteristics. This tells us that the camel was crucial to society at the time of the early development of the language). Second, irony was the the favorite tool of what humor there was among the Romans. It is reminiscent of New York humor (think about early Woody Allen films). Finally, much of the humor was directed at someone and poked fun at others. This says to me that the Romans focused on status to the degree that humor was used to belittle others. This seems to me consistent with a violent and exploitative society that accompanied Roman domination.Again, take these comments for what you will. I would, however, recommend Beard’s other works (especially, SPQR and the Fires of Vesuvius), or even better, some of Beard’s videos that are available on Amazon Prime for free.

⭐Mary Beard is so skilled at making complex topics and ancient literature accessible to the modern reader without sacrificing accuracy or overgeneralizing. This book will truly make you laugh out loud at jokes from over 2,000 years ago, and marvel at the strange similarities -and differences- in humor now and then.

⭐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.

⭐I am a huge Mary Beard fan in general and I only bought this book because she wrote it. She also has a very distinct writing voice and style that I think people either love or hate; I happen to love her style but I couldn’t recommend this book to everyone. If you do like her style, though, this book is amazingly critical and skeptical of traditional scholarship and casts really interesting doubt on conventional wisdom. She somehow managed to write a book about humor that, far from killing jokes by analyzing them, somehow manages to be really funny in and of itself in many places. It’s great.

⭐Great book by Mary Beard, as always. Admittedly, I’m a cultural relativist, but still I think that some of the examples she cites are still funny–funnier than she thinks. The Greeks, of kinder disposition than the Romans, also had very lively humor!

⭐This is a good book about humor in ancient Rome and Greece and how similar jokes are told today.My only disappointment was that there wasn’t a compilation of the jokes in a joke book format…

⭐Remarkably tedious work on a fascinating topic. The author spends too much time hedging her position, endlessly attempting to frame the subject within the glaringly obvious observation that laughter is subjective. To fill the void, she cites as many of her academic colleagues as she possibly can and engages in nitpicking banter over banalities rather than actually sharing, say, the jokes of the Saturnalia (which she frustratingly mentions without giving any examples from). In the end, a condescending, grossly over-academic work that leaves readers little if any material or room to imagine for themselves Roman laughter. Not recommended, unless the vapid vanity of high-brow scholarship is your thing.

⭐I bought this for my grandson who is reading Classics AND had a look at this myself – we both felt it was it was excellent value and ideal for holiday reading with a purpose. The ‘Joking, Tickling and Cracking Up’ gives a slightly misleading impression of what is basically a scholarly work about humour at this time. Worth buying to keep for reference purposes and coud be useful when making presentations or introducing a talk/lecture.

⭐Marys hardest book to read of the four I have…. goes into the kinda detail a PHD student might want to know… not a light read…. I made it only halfway through before I became bored..

⭐An excellent read – Beard is always provocative and turns her questions one way and another, like a jeweller with a gem – always illuminating, and unafraid to point out what we don’t know, and what we can’t know – and then to speculate a bit without neglecting the boundaries set by what we do know! A book to read- and re-read, as there is a lot to take in at first reading. Did Romans rally not smile (the physical gesture – obviously their conventions would have been different) – or did they merely ee no need for a disitnct word for it?

⭐As usual to be expected from the author – fun reading what I didn’t learn as a Classics graduate.

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