by Mary Beard
37. Rh. 2.12, 1389b10–12: καὶ φιλογέλωτες, διὸ καὶ φιλευτράπελοι· ἡ γὰρ εὐτραπελία πεπαιδευμένη ὕβρις ἐστίν. Note that Aristotle does not say that “wit” is the only way that those who are fond of laughter demonstrate this fondness—rather that those who are fond of laughter will also be witty.
38. The very nature of theater raises one problem about the location of the potential pain. The tacit assumption seems to be that the pain would be that of the actors in their comic masks, at whom the audience laughs. But why would they, whose job it was to provoke laughter, have been liable to pain in the face of it? A similar point is made, in relation to Aristophanes, by Sommerstein 2009, 112.
39. Goldhill 1995, 19; the issue is made even more loaded by the fact that the Nichomachean Ethics itself is addressed to the πεπαιδευμένος (Eth. Nich. 1.3, 1094b22–25).
40. Exactly how far Aristotle is presenting laughter as derisive in this passage is debatable. It depends in part on how far you imagine that his τὸ γελοῖον carries the derisive sense of the Greek word καταγελᾶν (“to laugh down” or “scoff at”). It is certainly true that Aristotle in the Poetics appears to offer a genealogy of comedy from aggressive satire, but the implications of this for laughter as a whole are less clear. Malcolm Schofield has usefully suggested to me that we might see the Aristotelian witty gentleman as a “tease” who gently makes fun of someone’s faults, in such a way as to give pleasure rather than pain—complicated by the fact (as Aristotle notes in Eth. Nic. 4.8, 1128a27–8) that people vary in what they find pleasurable or painful.
41. As is well known, the image of laughter in Greek literature is much more varied, nuanced, and (sometimes) gentle than derision. One classic example is the parental laughter of Hector and Andromache (Homer, Il. 6.471) when baby Astyanax takes fright at the sight of the plume of his father’s helmet.
42. Rh. 1.11, 1371b34–35; the words are bracketed in, for example, Kassel 1976, following Spengel 1867—and the exclusion tentatively supported by Fortenbaugh 2000, 340. Fortenbaugh 2000, with 2002, 120–126, provides a useful discussion of the topic.
43. David, In Isagogen 204.15–16: “Other animals too are capable of laughter, as Aristotle says in the History of Animals about the heron” (ἔστι καὶ ἄλλα ζῷα γελαστικά, ὥσπερ ἱστορεῖ ὁ Ἀριστοτέλης ἐν τῇ ∏ερὶ ζῴων περὶ τοῦ ἐρωδιοῦ). How exactly we are to explain this claim (mistake, misremembering, or subsequent loss of the relevant passage of Aristotle) is unclear.
44. Porphyry, Isagoge 4 (κἂν γὰρ μὴ γελᾷ ἀεί, ἀλλὰ γελαστικὸν λέγεται οὐ τῷ ἀεὶ γελᾶν ἀλλὰ τῷ πεφυκέναι), trans. Barnes 2003. Other writers of Roman imperial date to make this claim include Quintilian, Inst. 5.10.58; Clement, Paedagogus 2.5. The fact that in the second century CE, Lucian (Vit auct. 26) explicitly associates this claim with a character representing Peripatetic philosophy may, but does not necessarily, mean that it originated with Aristotle or his immediate successors (there were plenty of “Peripatetic philosophers” in the Roman Empire). See further, Barnes 2003, 208–9n22.
45. Ménager 1995, 7–41 (on the history of this idea from antiquity to the Renaissance); Screech 1997, 1–5. On Jesus, see Le Goff 1992. In the canonical gospels of the New Testament, Jesus never laughs; he does so repeatedly in the fragmentary Gnostic “Gospel of Judas” (see Pagels and King 2007, 128, arguing that his laughter always introduces the correction of an error).
46. Physiology of laughter: Pliny, HN 11.198; Aristotle, Part. an. 3.10, 673a1–12; babies: Pliny, HN 7.2, 7.72; Aristotle, Hist. an. 9.10, 587b5–7. On Zoroaster, see Herrenschmidt 2000; Hambartsumian 2001.
47. In the context of his discussion of metaphor at Rh. 3.11, 1412a19–b32 (often wrongly cited, for obvious reasons, as Rh. 3.2; see, for example, Morreall 1983, 131).
48. Leeman, Pinkster, and Rabbie 1989, 190–204, offers the most recent detailed discussion of the possible sources (arguing for a mixture of Greek and Roman); 188–89 discusses cavillatio, dicacitas, and facetiae. Fantham 2004, 186–208 (quotation on 189), with Corbeill 1996, 21–22nn13–14, a sharp, up-to-date account.
49. Halliwell 2008 is especially good on philosophical views of laughter: esp. 271–76 (Pythagoreanism), 276–302 (Platonic Socrates), 302–7 (Stoicism), 343–71 (Democritus), 372–87 (Cynicism).
50. I am referring here to Stein 2006 (the use of slapstick in a hookworm eradication campaign); Janus 2009 (the scripted laughter in Joyce interrupts the traditionally “silent reading” of the novels); Lavin and Maynard 2001 (comparing survey centers where interviewers are “prohibited” from laughing in the course of an interview with those where they are not); Kawakami et al. 2007 (drawing distinctions between and dating the occurrence of spontaneous vs. social laughter in infants).
51. Chesterfield 1774, vol. 1, 326–32, esp. 328 (letter of 9 March 1748), reprinted in D. Roberts 1992, 70–74, esp. 72; see further above, pp. 60, 66–67.
52. W. Lewis et al. 1914, 31 (“We only want Tragedy if it can clench its side-muscles like hand on it’s [sic] belly, and bring to the surface a laugh like a bomb”); Cixous 1976 (“She’s beautiful and she’s laughing,” 885; “rhythm that laughs you,” 882). The essays of Baudelaire 1981 [1855] and Bataille 1997 [1944] have been influential in many of the most radical approaches to laughter. The rich tradition of laughter in feminist writing, from fiction to psychoanalysis, is a major theme of Parvulescu 2010, esp. 101–18, to which Lessing 1962 (a feminist novel, in which laughter is a major player) would be an important addition (see, briefly, Scurr 2003). For a different strand of modern feminist use of laughter (in relation to a Latin text), see above, pp. 84–85.
53. Morreall 1983, 4–37; Critchley 2002, 2–3; more skeptically, Halliwell 2008, 11. Lippitt 1994; 1995a; and 1995b offer a clear, critical introduction to each theory in turn.
54. Hobbes 1969 [1640], 42; Sudden Glory is the title of Sanders 1995.
55. Ludovici 1932, 98–103; Gruner 1978, 43; R. A. Martin 2007, 44–47 (a useful summary). Quotation: Rapp 1951, 21.
56. Rh. 3.11, 1412a31.
57. Kant 1952 [1790], 196–203, quotation on 199; Bergson 1911, esp. 12–38; Raskin 1985; Attardo and Raskin 1991; Attardo 1994 (put into a classical perspective by N. Lowe 2007, 1–12). For those unfamiliar with the old English joke about the door, it plays on the aural ambiguity between the noun jar (a storage vessel, often of glass) and the adjective/adverb ajar (meaning “slightly open”).
58. Deckers and Kizer 1974; Deckers and Kizer 1975; Nerhardt 1976; Deckers 1993; with a useful overview in R. A. Martin 2007, 68–70. The question of whether the subjects in this case may (also) be laughing at the experimenters is rarely raised!
59. Spencer 1860.
60. Phil. 2.39: explaining that as the army camp was “full of care” (plena curae), the jokes served “to relax their minds” (animis relaxantur—the verb can indicate a release from pressure)—though I may be trying to push this too far, when Cicero is thinking much more generally of the role of joking as a break from the cares of war. Corbeill 1996, 185–89, discusses the jokes made on this occasion.
61. Freud 1960 [1905] (“The hearer of the joke laughs with the quota of psychical energy which has become free through the lifting of the inhibitory cathexis,” 201). Experimental psychology does not confirm what Freud’s argument seems to imply: that the more repressed you are, the more you will laugh at a dirty joke (Morreall 1983, 32).
62. M. Smith 2008 rightly criticizes the preoccupation of most laughter theorists with uncontrollable laughter. Ruch and Eckman 2001 is typical in its classification of outbursts of laughter into “spontaneous” on the one hand and “contrived” or “fake” on the other (the terms themselves are a giveaway). The recent neurological work of Sophie Scott and her colleagues has been much more interested in “social” as well as uncontrollable laughter, tra
cing differences and similarities in the response of the brain to laughter of different types. See, for example, McGettigan et al. 2013; S. Scott 2013.
63. Scruton in Scruton and Jones 1982 offers useful observations about the range of and exclusions from modern studies of laughter (“It is not laughter, but laughter at or about something, that interests the philosopher,” 198); likewise Parvulescu 2010, 3–4 (“Most ‘theories of laughter’ are not concerned with laughter”).
64. Morreall 1983, 30, points to the difficulty in Freud’s view of the conversion of psychic into physical energy, as does, rather more elegantly, Cioffi 1998, 264–304, in his discussion of Wittgenstein’s critique of Freud (“Imagine a world in which, like ours, people laughed at jokes, but unlike ours did not know what that were laughing at until they discovered the unconscious energic processes hypothesised by Freud,” 277). Richlin 1992a, 72, sums up some of the basic problems with the Freudian account succinctly: “That the pleasure consists in relief, in the released pressure of a lifted inhibition, does not describe the feeling of a laugh very well.” Earlier generations of modern laughter theorists were more concerned to link the physical “symptoms” of laughter to its cause: Laurence Joubert, for example, traces laughter to a physical reaction of the heart, contracting and expanding in response to conflicting emotions of joy and sorrow (Joubert 1980 [1579], 44–45). Gatrell 2006, 162–67, traces the eighteenth-century reaction against such physical explanations.
65. See, for example, Gruner 1997, 131–46 (in which a groan in response to a pun is an admission of defeat). Note Baudelaire’s pointed dismissal of the theory as a whole: “Laughter, so they say, comes from superiority. I should not be surprised if, in face of this discovery, the physiologist himself were to burst out laughing at the thought of his own superiority” (1981 [1855], 145). On the general problems with all-encompassing theories of “amusement,” see Scruton in Scruton and Jones 1982, 202.
66. Freud 1960 [1905], 248–54. Perhaps the most problematic aspect of this very problematic argument is Freud’s claim that in the process of ideation more energy is expended on a large movement than on a small one.
67. Berger 1997, 29–30 (incongruity); Sanders 1995, 249. Quotation: Bergson 1911, 18.
68. Morreall 1983, 16 (incongruity)—though Morreall adds, “Because it [the incongruity theory] did not fit in with the superiority theory of his Poetics and Nichomachean Ethics, he never developed it”; Atkinson 1993, 17–18 (relief).
69. Hobbes 1996 [1651], 43; Skinner 2001, 445–46; Skinner 2002, 175–76; Skinner 2004, 162–64.
70. Richlin 1992a, 60 (psychosocial dynamics); Goldhill 2006, 84 (not knowing what we are laughing at); Corbeill 1996, 4–5 (tendentious vs. innocent).
71. Le Goff 1997, 46–47, briefly discusses the question of how far laughter can be reduced “to a single phenomenon.”
72. Douglas 1971, 389. Embedded in her remarks is also the assumption, standard at least since Bergson (1911, 12), that laughter is essentially social, that you cannot laugh alone (hence the canned laughter on television programs). For Pliny, see above, p. 25. I say probably because in some circumstances and in some cultures, belching too can straddle the divide of nature and culture and be taken as meaningful. The other action to which Pliny refers in this passage, spitting, is different again: this is always communication, and not a natural bodily eruption.
73. Aristotle, [Pr.] 35.7, 965a18–22, though the next passage of this compilation (almost certainly put together in Peripatetic circles over a long period from the third century BCE on) claims that people are ticklish only in the armpits. Joubert 1980 [1579], 86, identifies the skin between the toes as a prime site for tickling.
74. Provine 2000, 99–127; R. A. Martin 2007, 173–76. One much disputed theory of tickling—the so-called Darwin-Hecker hypothesis—suggests that there is much more in common between tickling and humor than is usually allowed: both produce laughter by very similar neural processes involving the same region of the brain (Darwin 1872, 201–2; Panksepp 2000, but see C. R. Harris and Christenfeld 1997; C. R. Harris and Alvarado 2005).
75. In my experience, one particularly sadistic version involves contriving an excuse to remove a child from the room—when s/he returns, all the other children are uproariously laughing. Soon enough the returner will join in the laughter, and at that point s/he faces increasingly aggressive questions from the others on what s/he is laughing at—until tears are the result.
76. Lautréamont 1965 [1869], 5.
77. Nietzsche 2002 [1886], 174–75; 1990 [1886], 218.
78. Douglas 1971, 387.
79. Turnbull 1961 (quotation on 45); the mountain people (the Ik) are the subject of Turnbull 1973. Ballard 2006 and Boyer 1989 offer critiques of Turnbull’s general approach to the Pygmies. “Subjective, judgmental and naïve” are the words of Fox 2001 (referring specifically to Turnbull’s treatment of the Ik).
80. On Chesterfield, see pp. 36, 60, 66–67.
81. For example, Catullus 64.284; Lucretius 1.8. The etymology of ridere is uncertain, but the Greek γελᾶν (laugh) may have a root in the idea of brightness and luster, and it is not inconceivable (though unlikely) that the poets are making a scholarly allusion to that in their usage. On γελᾶν, see Halliwell 2008, 13n33, 523, for a sensible discussion, with bibliography.
82. Darwin 1872, 120–21, 132–37, 198–212; with Davila-Ross et al. 2011 (as just one example of up-to-the-minute investigations of ape laughter). Dogs: Douglas 1971. Rats: Panksepp and Burgdorf 1999; Panksepp 2000.
83. Panksepp and Burgdorf 1999, 231, briefly discusses the opposition.
84. Scruton in Scruton and Jones 1982, 199.
3. THE HISTORY OF LAUGHTER
1. Herzen’s remark (2012 [1858], 68) is quoted by, among others, Bakhtin 1968, 59; Halliwell 2008, vii; and Le Goff 1997, 41.
2. Le Goff 1997, 41, usefully highlights this distinction between protocol and practice.
3. Published as Thomas 1977. In French, the work of Jacques Le Goff has been similarly programmatic; see Le Goff 1989. Thomas’s original talk was given as the Neale Lecture in English History at University College London on 3 December 1976. He started by suggesting that Sir John Neale, in whose honor the series had been founded, would have thought laughter an “ill-defined and even unhistorical” topic of research. The idea that one’s predecessors or more senior colleagues would disapprove of the subject is something of a cliché among historians of laughter. Saint-Denis (1965, 9) complained that his university authorities had found the topic so distasteful that they refused even to publish a summary of his course of lectures—“Le rire des Latins”—in their Revue des Cours et Conférences; even in the 1990s, Verberckmoes 1999, ix, said much the same.
4. Plutarch, Mor. 633c (= Quaest. conviv. 2.1.9). Cicero, De or. 2.246, likewise puts a joke against a luscus (a man blind in one eye) in the category of the “scurrilous”; predictably, the emperor Elagabalus (SHA, Heliog. 29.3) enjoyed making a joke of all kinds of people with bodily “peculiarities,” from the fat to the bald and the lusci (see p. 77). Plutarch’s protocols might suggest that the joking songs of Caesar’s soldiers (Suet., Iul. 51) should be seen as relatively good humored.
5. Dio Chrysostom, Or. 32.1 (ἐπειδὴ παίζοντες ἀεὶ διατελεῖτε καὶ οὐ προσέχοντες καὶ παιδιᾶς μὲν καὶ ἡδονῆς καὶ γέλωτος, ὡς εἰπεῖν, οὐδέποτε ἀπορεῖτε), 32.56 (“as if you’d been hitting the bottle”—ἐοίκατε κραιπαλῶσιν).
6. Tacitus, Germ. 19. This passage already hints at some of the complexities in understanding the sense of the apparently simple word ridet, which I will explore in more detail. “Laughs off”—in the sense of “takes as a joke”—seems attractive here and accords with the phrase that follows (nec corrumpere et corrumpi saeculum vocatur, “and to corrupt or be corrupted is not put down to ‘the times we live in’”). But as many recent critics have emphasized (for example, Richlin 1992a), “ridi
cule” in traditional Roman culture could be a powerful weapon against deviance. My hunch is that Tacitus is being (as often) even smarter than he seems and is querying not merely contemporary Roman corruption but some of the most traditional mechanisms (here ridicule) through which Rome had policed its morality. (But see above, pp. 105–8, 120–23, on the tendency of modern scholarship to overemphasize the aggressive, policing functions of Roman laughter.)
7. Twain 1889, 28–29.
8. Leeman, Pinkster, and Rabbie 1989, 259.
9. Murgia 1991, esp. 184–93.
10. Inst. 6.3.100, the Latin text of D. A. Russell in the Loeb Classical Library (similar to that printed in the Teubner text, ed. L. Radermacher).
11. “Hopelessly ungrammatical” because mentiri is a deponent verb, used in the passive voice, whereas mentis is an active form. There is a little more logic to some of these changes than I have perhaps made it appear: mentis, for example, might be a (not unparalleled) manuscript conflation of an original me[n] ex te metiris.
12. Murgia 1991, 184–87, includes further and fuller arguments for his changes.
13. The impossible obicientibus arbore demands some change. Murgia would reasonably claim that it is easier to see how his version (barbare) rather than the more usual obicienti atrociora could have been corrupted into the garbled text of the manuscript (arbore). But he has not convinced other textual critics (for example Russell, whose Loeb text of 2001 notes but does not follow Murgia). Murgia’s emendation of the main joke entails other changes to earlier sentences. The phrase “Umis quoque uti belle datur” introduces the story in the manuscripts of Quintilian. Umis makes no sense whatsoever. It is usually emended to “Contumeliis quoque . . .” (“Insults also can be neatly used”—“I suppose this emendation must be right,” Winterbottom 1970, 112); Murgia suggests “Verbis quoque . . .” (“Words/quips also can be neatly used”).