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Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up (Sather Classical Lectures) Hardcover – June 25, 2014

by Mary Beard (Author)

12 customer reviews

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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?

Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up (Sather Classical Lectures)

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Product Details

Series: Sather Classical Lectures (Book 71)
Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: University of California Press (June 25, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0520277163
ISBN-13: 978-0520277168
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.2 x 8.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #144,106 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #14 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Humor > Theories of Humor
- #16 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Genres & Styles > Humor
- #60 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Movements & Periods > Ancient & Classical

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Customer Reviews

3.9 out of 5 stars

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2 star		9%
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

A funny thing happened on my way......

By JGT on August 4, 2014

Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

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.

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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful

Trying to Understand Ancient Laughter

By Rob Hardy HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWER on July 21, 2014

Format: Hardcover

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.Read more ›

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

An Interesting, but not Humorous, History of Laughter in Rome and Greece

By Amazon Customer VINE VOICE on September 22, 2014

Format: Hardcover

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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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

FIRST-RATE SCHOLARSHIP ELEGANTLY PRESENTED --A FASCINATING TOPIC

By David Keymer TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on September 11, 2014

Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

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.Read more ›

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

An in depth analysis of the subject but somewhat of a slow read.

Published 2 months ago by Kathleen J. McCabe

The jokes told in old Rome are still funny today. Only problem is it is a text book.

Published 6 months ago by Golfer

Mary Beard is a superb writer and social commentator on Roman society!

Mary Beard is a superb writer...and "the dangerous don" to boot. I really enjoy her writing style and wit! Keep up the good work!

Published 9 months ago by Michael Thomas Fortson

Excellent Scholarly Investigation

4.5 Stars. This scholarly investigation into humor in Ancient Rome delves into what the ancients thought caused laughter, what made something funny, and the use of "comedy"... Read more

Published 10 months ago by bonnie_blu

Great book by Mary Beard

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. Read more

Published 11 months ago by Jack Murray

PEDANTIC AND REPETITIVE

Published 12 months ago by Edward J. McKinney

Written with a critical eye and great fun it exudes the humor of the...

So unexpected a subject; so obvious in retrospect. Written with a critical eye and great fun it exudes the humor of the "Don's life" Don. Another wonderful book.

Published 14 months ago by David J Telford

Definetely not for the general reader

Not for the general reader, not at all comparable to her books on Pompeii and the roman triumph, it's a somewhat abstruse treatment of roman humor. Read more

Published 14 months ago by E F Christian Weise

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