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+--- Thread: Humour in the ancient world (/thread-756.html)
Humour in the ancient world - C C - Apr 17, 2015
http://eaglesanddragonspublishing.com/humour-in-the-ancient-world/
EXCERPT: [...] The joke above is actually a Roman joke about 2000 years old. Yes, that old. It’s one of 250-odd jokes in the oldest joke book in the world known as the Philagelos, or ‘The Laughter Lover’. It is thought that this text is a compendium of jokes over several hundred years. The earliest manuscript is thought to date to the 4th or 5th centuries A.D.
[...] A colleague of mine recently shared a CBC interview with eminent classicist and historian Mary Beard on the subject of her book about humour in the Roman world entitled: Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up. The wonderful interview with Mary Beard got me to thinking about this little-thought-of aspect of life in the ancient world.
[...] Slap stick comedy was a part of humour in the ancient world, but in the interview Mary Beard has put forth the idea that there are other aspects of ancient humour which we might not, or cannot, understand.
A professional beggar had been letting his girlfriend think that he was rich and of noble birth. Once, when he was getting a handout at the neighbor’s house, he suddenly saw her. He turned around and said: “Have my dinner-clothes sent here.” (Philagelos, #106)
When it comes to many ancient jokes, our cultural and temporal disconnect make them simply ‘not funny’.
Another reason why the humour of some ancient jokes may be lost on us is that perhaps the medieval monks copying these down simply made mistakes or interpreted them incorrectly.
Mary Beard points out that there is no real way to know how ancient people laughed either. This is a bit of a trickier concept to wrap one’s head around. What were ancients’ reactions to laughing? Did they have uncontrollable laughter?
My thought is that yes, maybe our jokes are different from what Roman jokes were, just like how some people find Monty Python funny (I know I do!), while others wonder what the big deal is. I also think that we are perhaps not so different in our physical reactions. For example...
RE: Humour in the ancient world - Yazata - Apr 18, 2015
Aristophanes' The Clouds is the example of ancient humor that I'm most aware of. It's a caracature of the ancient Athenian philosophers, particularly Socrates.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clouds
Apparently comedies became a major theatrical genre in Hellenistic times. Many were written and performed and ancient critics wrote 'books' (literally scrolls) about them.