ANCIENT HUMOUR

Paul Schulten

"An egghead went for a dip and almost drowned. As a result, he swore never to go near the water again before first learning how to swim."1 This is the second joke in a unique joke book, the Philogelos, put together in around the fifth century AD. Its uniqueness has nothing to do with its being particularly hilarious. We may smile at this joke, but only a small child would be likely to laugh heartily at it. Children are still able to enjoy the fault in the 'egghead"s reasoning and the joke's simplicity does not yet bother them. The Philogelos is unique because it is the only joke book to have survived from the ancient world. It contains 265 jokes, many of which feature a so-called egghead (scholastikos) as protagonist.2 The main characteristic of the egghead is that he tries again and again to reason clearly, but fails to do so. The consumer of the joke could thus revel in his own superior reasoning. The fact that the Philogelos is the only ancient joke book in existence could be due either to bad luck or to the over-serious attitudes of medieval monks. The Greeks and Romans themselves were obviously quite interested in such collections; many of them existed and they were apparently quite popular.3 The Philogelos was part of a long tradition that went back at least as far as the famous Comedians' Club in the Athens of Demosthenes.4 We are told that Philip II of Macedon paid no less than one talent for a copy of the club's joke book. 5 Cicero himself probably put three such collections together, and during Augustus' reign a rhetorician called Melissus

1 Translation in Baldwin ( 1983) 1. 2 See Rapp ( 1951) 286-290, and especially Baldwin ( 1983) 52, for other possible translations of scholastikos as professor or pedant. 3 Reekmans (1992) 191. On ancient joke books see Bremmer (1997) 16-18. 4 See Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 614d-e, on this club. Bremmer (1997) 15. 5 Baldwin ( 1983) x. 210 PAUL SCHULTEN

compiled no fewer than 150 volumes of jokes.6 A well-known char­ acter in Plautus, the parasite Gelasimos, sells humorous stories to pay for his food. 7 Now Gelasimos calls his merchandise logos ridicu/os in Latin. Ridicu/us means that which arouses laughter, just as his own name does in Greek. Cicero and Quintilian use the same word to denote humour. 8 According to Quintilian, ridicula are intentional jokes and have something in common with urbanity. 9 Preferably, they should be produced by an urbane wit. Aristotle distinguished between two kinds of wit: the ability to enjoy a joke and the ability to make one. 10 It seems obvious that humour can be produced either intentionally or unintentionally. In the last century Samuel Butler said that in his opinion the best humour and irony were generally quite unconscious. This article will concern itself with both forms as they appeared in the classical world. What techniques did the Greeks and Romans use deliberately to stir up laughter and what circumstances brought forth laughter unsolicited? The answers will reveal what constituted a sense of humour in ancient society. It is important that we should take our own sense of humour into account, since all studies of humour are in one way or another comparative. The funniness of words or situations can only be acknowledged by reference to our own sense of humour. We are, furthermore, much influenced by modern theories of humour, de­ veloped in various studies of philosophy, psychology and sociology by, for instance, Bergson, Freud and Apte. Discussing ancient humour, then, involves us in constantly going back and forth in time, a process made possible by the relative continuity of European humour. 11 In order to structure this process more clearly I shall refer again and again to early modern Europe and especially to the Netherlands. I shall make no distinction between

6 Suetonius, De grammaticis, 21. 7 Plautus, Stichus, 221. On Gelasimos as a type of jester in Plautus see Corbett (1986) I 1-26. 8 See for instance Cicero, De oratore II, 63: Notissimum ridiculi genus cum aliud expectamus aliud dicitur. 9 Quintilian, Inst. or. 6, 3-17. See Reekmans (1992) 189 on this. 10 Aristotle, Ethica Eud. III 7, 1234a. 11 Palmer (1994) 52.