Laughter in Ancient Rome (22 page)

Cicero’s discussion points his readers to important sides of the laughing process beyond the familiar topics of derision and control (indeed, derision is not an especially prominent theme here). We learn about the physical nature of laughter; about different ways of raising a laugh from an audience, from funny words to funny faces; and about what was off limits as a proper subject of laughter. But one crucial undercurrent is the risk associated with provoking laughter. Laughter was always in danger of rebounding: it was not only the orator’s opponent who could be isolated and exposed by raising a laugh; its provocation could also expose and isolate the orator himself. The two senses of
ridiculus
(“he makes us laugh” versus “the one we laugh at”) were always perilously close. You had to be careful in playing for laughs.
³³

CICERO ON THE (JOKING) ORATOR

Cicero wrote
On the Orator
in the middle 50s BCE, shortly after his return from exile, when he was trying, with only limited success, to recover his power and influence in the city of Rome.
³⁴
Extending over three books, it is not primarily a rhetorical training manual with rules for budding speakers (though it includes plenty of nitty-gritty technical advice) but rather a more general consideration of the nature of the ideal orator and the skills (physical, intellectual, personal, moral, philosophical) that such a man requires. It was written against the background of long-standing debates, going back at least to fifth-century BCE Greece, on the morality of rhetoric (how far was effective persuasion necessarily deceptive?), its relations with philosophy and other forms of knowledge, whether rhetoric was a discipline that could be taught, and if so how.
³⁵

Following the example of Plato—to whom there is a direct reference near the start of the first book—Cicero composed his treatise in the form of a discussion among a group of learned Roman “amateurs” in the art of oratory.
³⁶
Its dramatic date is 91 BCE, and its cast of characters is carefully chosen to match. The leading roles are taken by Lucius Licinius Crassus, at whose villa the discussion is set, and Marcus Antonius, both renowned orators of the period and mentors of the young Cicero. They are joined by other discussants, who are imagined to be present for all or part of the two days over which the debates take place. These include the much younger Gaius Aurelius Cotta (Cicero’s informant of the contents of the discussion, according to the dramatic fiction) and—to give him his full name—Gaius Julius Caesar Strabo Vopiscus (an indirect ancestor of Caesar the dictator), who takes the lead in the discussion of laughter.
³⁷

Over the three books, the discussion covers a wide range of topics, from the power or harm of eloquence and the kind of knowledge a good orator needs (book 1) through the various means of oratorical persuasion (book 2) to issues of style and various forms of delivery (book 3). For the most part, the debate is fairly gentle. Although the Platonic literary and philosophical background is clear, this is not the kind of dialogue in which a Socrates-like figure uses his dazzling intellectual firepower and quick repartee to trounce the opposition and impose his own arguments on the assembled company, and readers. Here we find a much less aggressively antagonistic style of debate, with extended contributions by the main participants and less repartee (which may be what Cicero meant when he wrote in a letter that he had adopted the “Aristotelian mode” in
On the Orator
³⁸
). Where there are disagreements between the various characters (as on the question of the knowledge required by the ideal orator, in book 1), it is usually assumed, rightly or wrongly, that Cicero’s views are broadly those of the character of Crassus.
³⁹

For a relatively hard-core work of ancient oratorical theory,
On the Orator
has recently attracted a surprising amount of attention from Roman historians and critics in general. There has been a lively interest in—among other things—its distinctively “Roman” character (notwithstanding its obvious and open debts to earlier Greek discussion), its relationship to the politics of the period (both that of its dramatic date and that of its composition), and its role in Cicero’s self-fashioning as a “new man,” as well as in the performative aspects of Roman oratory and masculinity. (It would, I suspect, come as a surprise to Cicero that his treatise has been discussed, at length, in the course of a chapter headed “Love.”)
⁴⁰
The discussion of the oratorical uses of laughter takes up more than seventy chapters (or around one-fifth) of book 2, toward the center of the whole work.
⁴¹
Following an account of various other means of persuasion, largely fronted by Antonius, the words in this section are almost entirely given to the character of Julius Caesar Strabo—and are presented as light relief from what has been a rather lengthy exposition up to this point. As Antonius remarks, “I’m already worn out by the tough path my argument has taken and shall take a rest while Caesar is talking, as if I were in some convenient inn.”
⁴²
In tune with this, throughout the section we find laughter and a bit of banter among the participants.
⁴³

Modern critics tend to mislead when they describe these chapters as a digression specifically on “humor” or “wit” or “Witz und Humor.” To be sure, those topics take a substantial part in the discussion, and they provide the link from the previous section, on how to appeal to the audience (“Attractive too, and often extremely effective, are jokes and witticisms”
⁴⁴
). But when the character of Strabo (as I shall call him from now on) takes the floor in this debate, his principal subject is laughter, divided—as Strabo insists—into five subfields: (a) what laughter is, (b) where it comes from, (c) whether an orator should want to provoke (
movere
) laughter in his audience, (d) how far, and (e) what the different categories of “the laughable” (
ridiculum
) are.
⁴⁵
The first three subfields get only brief discussion. The final pair, especially the last one, are given much fuller treatment.

As a piece of Ciceronian writing—which of course it is, despite some wild ideas that it was based on a treatise by Strabo—it is brave and innovative but occasionally, let’s be honest, can seem a bit muddled. Thanks to the careful analysis by Edwin Rabbie, no one any longer seriously imagines (as once they did) that it is little more than a scissors-and-paste job, merely regurgitating earlier discussions of laughter by Greek theorists, with a few Roman examples thrown in along the way.
⁴⁶
This is not, of course, to deny any engagement on Cicero’s part with the Greek rhetorical and philosophical tradition on laughter. Strabo explicitly refers to Greek books “on the laughable” (
de ridiculis
), which he claims to have read.
⁴⁷
And several observations, as well as some of the terminology used, appear to reflect an Aristotelian or at least a Peripatetic influence: from the first word of the section, where
suavis
(agreeable) is probably the equivalent of the Aristotelian
hēdus,
to the more general idea that the “locus . . . et regio quasi” (the field . . . and as it were the province) of the laughable lies in “what you might call the dishonorable or ugly,” which echoes what Aristotle says in the
Poetics
and was most likely one line that his followers took.
⁴⁸
The engagement is hardly surprising: almost anyone with any intellectual credentials who was trying to write about any ethical subject in the first century BCE would have been bound to think about what the Peripatetics had to say.
⁴⁹

But more important, it is also an emphatically “Roman” work. Some of the crucial distinctions that Cicero draws (such as that between
cavillatio
and
dicacitas
—“wit spread throughout a speech” versus “individual barbs”) rely on characteristically Latin terminology and have, so far as we can tell, no direct precedent in Greek theorizing.
⁵⁰
All the examples that he gives of laughter and bons mots are drawn from Roman history and oratory (not just thrown in, they are integral to his argument and sometimes even seem to lead it
⁵¹
). Besides, when Strabo refers to earlier Greek works on “the laughable,” he does so not to follow their theories but to dismiss them: “I had rather hoped,” he says, “that I would be able to learn something from them . . . but those who tried to impart any systematic theory of the subject showed themselves so silly [
insulsi,
literally “lacking in salt”] that there was nothing else to laugh at in them but their silliness [
insulsitas
].”
⁵²

In other words, what we have in this long discussion of oratorical laughter is a characteristically Roman cultural product: Roman practice and tradition, theorized by a Roman intellectual in dialogue with his Greek predecessors.

THE ARGUMENT: STRUCTURE, SYSTEM, AND TERMINOLOGY

The details of this lengthy argument on laughter are in places difficult to fathom, individual passages (and jokes) are opaque, and the text is frequently corrupt and inaccurate.
⁵³
All the same, the gist of the section is clear enough. After Antonius has handed over to Strabo to discuss the new topic (because he is so outstanding at
iocus
and
facetiae
), Strabo starts (218) by laying down a basic distinction:
facetiae
(wit) is divided between what the “ancients” (
veteres
⁵⁴
) called
cavillatio
(extended wit) and
dicacitas
(barbs). Neither of these forms of wit can be taught, he claims, as both depend on natural facility, and he backs this up with a number of examples designed to show not only how useful such witticisms can be but also how impossible it would be to be trained in them. One of the most memorable (220) is a quick gibe (a case of
dicacitas
) made by Strabo’s half-brother, whose name, Catulus, literally means “Puppy.” He was challenged by his opponent in some courtroom, presumably in the course of a case of theft: “Why are you barking, Puppy Dog [
Catule
]?” “Because I see a thief” was Catulus’ instant retort.
⁵⁵

Some general conversation among the participants follows (228)—including some banter about which of them is really best at joking. But they end up giving the floor back to Strabo and agreeing that even if laughter raising is not a discipline that can be taught as such, there are nevertheless some practical guidelines (
observatio quaedam est
) that he could discuss and explain. At this point (235), Strabo outlines his five questions about laughter (see p. 109). He briefly waves aside the first three. The problem of the nature of laughter itself he leaves to Democritus; even the supposed experts do not understand it, he claims. On the question of its origin, he pinpoints, without much explanation, “what you might call the dishonorable or ugly” (236). And third, yes, there are several reasons why an orator should try to raise a laugh:
hilaritas
brings goodwill, everyone is impressed by cleverness, it crushes or makes light of or deflects an opponent, it reveals the speaker as a refined and witty (
urbanus
) individual, and most of all, it relieves the austerity of a speech and gets rid of offensive suggestions that cannot easily be dealt with by reason.

The next question—of how far an orator should use laughter—is treated at much greater length, over eleven chapters (237–47). Here Strabo issues a series of warnings about circumstances in which laughter is not appropriate (people do not laugh at serious wickedness or misery, for example) and about what kind of laughter raising is off limits for the orator. Particularly to be avoided is the laughter associated with the
scurra
or with the mime actor (
mimus
).
⁵⁶
And he gives a series of examples that point up the boundary between the acceptable and the unacceptable. Crassus, he explains (telling of an incident involving one of his fellow discussants), once raised a big laugh in a public gathering by a flagrant take-off of a very posh opponent—getting up and imitating his facial expression, his (presumably posh) accent, and even the pose he adopted in his statues (242).
⁵⁷
But Strabo stresses that this kind of display “has to be handled with the greatest of caution”: a hint of mimicry is perfectly allowable (so that a listener “may imagine more than he actually sees”), but too much is the mark of the mime actor. Crassus’ showmanship was dangerously marginal. Other golden rules include not to seize every opportunity that presents itself for raising a laugh, always to do so for a point (not simply for the sake of laughter itself), and not to seem to have prepared a joke in advance. He quotes a quip against a one-eyed man (“I’ll come and dine with you, because I see you’ve got space for one”). This was the joke of a
scurra,
because it was premeditated, it would have applied to all one-eyed men (not just its immediate target), and it was unprovoked (246).