by Mary Beard
This sophistication extends to the use of laughter within the text. In the short version of the story ascribed to Lucian, laughter appears as a simple diagnostic consistent with the standard ancient position that only humans could laugh. That is to say, Lucius laughs before his transformation from human shape but never as an ass. As soon as he has been turned into an ass, in fact, the narrator remarks that his laugh has turned into a bray (onkēthmos).117 In Apuleius’ novel, laughter (largely by others, at the donkey) is woven throughout the plot, and the question of who is laughing at whom—and why—is one part of the hermeneutic riddling of the text. I want to conclude this chapter by looking harder at the most striking role for laughter in the structure of the novel, the festival of the god Risus (Laughter), in which Lucius is a reluctant participant immediately before his accidental transformation into an animal. This is the original context for the words auctor et actor, and in that context we find a rather different sense for the now famous phrase.118
The basic plot of the episode is again fairly simple, though this time it is found in Apuleius alone. It starts one night early in the novel, when Lucius, still in his human form, is at a drunken dinner with relatives in the town where he is staying (Hypata in Thessaly). They happen to mention that on the next day they will be celebrating one of their annual festivals, sollemnis dies.119 It is a nice pun on the Latin sollemnis (both “regular established ritual” and “solemn” in our sense). For the god to be honored is Laughter, who will be propitiated with an appropriately “merry and jolly ritual.”
That festival, however, almost instantly seems to be forgotten, as the story takes a different turn. For things start to go very wrong after dinner, when Lucius gets back to the house where he is staying—only to discover three men trying to break in. He ends up killing the lot. In the morning he is arrested for murder and taken to the forum to be tried. The puzzling thing is that every one of the spectators is laughing120—and there are so many of them that the case has to be transferred to the theater. There Lucius makes a speech in his defense, fearing the worst, until finally the magistrates insist that he uncover the corpses of the three men he has killed, to take stock of his crime. When he eventually does so, he discovers that they are not corpses at all but three wineskins that he gashed to pieces in his drunken state, thinking they were robbers.121 Laughter breaks out even more, and so fiercely that some of the audience, doubled up, have to “press on their stomachs to ease the pain.”
Lucius is perplexed and upset, and it does not assuage him very much then to be told by the magistrates that this is the festival of Laughter—which always blossoms with some new ingenuity. In this case, that ingenuity had been the joke on Lucius and his mock trial. In order to escape further laughter (“which I myself had created”122), he goes off to the baths before meeting up with the slave girl—who within a few pages will have accidentally contrived his metamorphosis into a donkey.
It is a memorable episode, and it so caught the imagination of Federico Fellini that he transposed a version of it into his film adaptation of Petronius’ Satyricon. It has also caught the imagination of generations of classicists, who have tried to explain what this strange festival is all about and what it is doing in Apuleius’ plot. There have been a number of overoptimistic attempts to suggest that it has definite links to real religious rituals and a real god of laughter (for which there is no reliable evidence at all) or, rather more plausibly, to link the proceedings evoked here to more general structures of ancient religious thought and practice (notably the scapegoat ritual—with Lucius playing the part of the scapegoat123). Others have seen it in more specifically textual terms, as a meta-literary device pointing to the comic genre of the novel as a whole, and recently it has been argued that the episode is based on a Roman mime.124
This (literary) festival of Risus has, however, even more important implications for our understanding of how ancient laughter works, both inside and outside this novel. Several critics have pointed to the parallels (or reversals) between this gelastic episode, which immediately precedes Lucius’ transformation into a donkey, and the gelastic episode we have just examined, with the cooks and their master, which immediately precedes his return to human form. In both instances, Lucius is the object of laughter, but whereas at the festival of Risus he is ashamed and humiliated, at the dinner he feels increasingly pleased by the laughter that greets him.125 Apuleius is surely exploiting the role of laughter in marking that fragile boundary between man and beast.
Beyond this, the episode also points to the ambiguities of laughter more generally. That is partly a question of terminology (for the reader, one of the jokes of the festival of Risus is the foregrounding of cachinnare as much as ridere126) and partly the old conundrum of how we explain laughter’s causes (the narrative of the ritual proceedings is built around Lucius’ puzzlement at what the laughter is all about). But it is the slogan auctor et actor—which Winkler used to highlight the edgy relationship in the novel between Lucius as narrator and Lucius as character in the plot—that offers the sharpest reflection on laughter (sharper even than Winkler acknowledged). For here we find a particularly memorable summing-up of that recurrent theme in ancient reflections of laughter: the ambivalence between laughter’s producer and laughter’s butt.
The phrase is used by the magistrates of Hypata when they reassure Lucius that his whole ordeal has been part of the festival of Risus. After they have explained their annual celebration of divine Laughter, they insist that Lucius is now under the god’s protection: “That god will accompany the man who is auctorem et actorem suum, lovingly and with his blessing, everywhere he goes, and he will never let you feel grief in your heart, and he will constantly brighten your expression with serene pleasure.”127
What do these magistrates mean by “the god accompanying his [suum, that is ‘his own’] auctorem et actorem”? They are certainly not referring to Winkler’s idea of the tricky relationship between narrator and character or between “the authorization of a text’s meaning and the credibility of ego-narrative.”128 However insightful his reading is—and, of course, this optimistic prophecy uttered just before Lucius is miserably transformed into an ass is just one example of what he had in mind—the magistrates’ words in their original context mean something quite different. Alexander Kirichenko, in arguing for the link between this episode and mime, has focused particularly on the word actorem. That, for him, is precisely what Lucius was in this scene: a mime actor.129 But we should not overlook the explicit link (underlined by suum) to Laughter itself, divine or not: Lucius is being cast as the producer and agent of Laughter. In other words, through the voice of the magistrates, explaining to this man-about-to-be-ass the nature of this pseudogod, we find again a lesson about the dual aspect of laughter and the close connection between its active producer (auctor) and its vehicle, agent, or, as we would say, butt (actor).130
As the words of Lucius himself underline, when he reflects shortly afterward on the laughter “which I myself had created” (quem ipse fabricaveram), there is a fine line between the person who makes you laugh and the one you laugh at. Lucius is both.
CHAPTER 8
The Laughter Lover
An egghead [scholastikos] and a bald man and a barber were making a journey together and camping out in a lonely place. They arranged for each of them to stay awake in turn for four hours and guard the luggage. When it fell to the barber to keep watch first, wanting to pass the time, he shaved the head of the scholastikos and, when his shift was done, woke him up. The scholastikos rubbed his head as he came to and found himself hairless. “What a right idiot the barber is,” he said. “He’s gone all wrong and woken up the bald man instead of me.”1
This is number 56 in the ancient collection of some 265 jokes that goes under the title Philogelos, or “Laughter lover.”2 Written in decidedly unstylish Greek, the collection is usually dated to the later Roman Empire (the fourth or fifth century CE is the favorite guess) and includes a wide range of gags—
from jokes about ridiculous misers (“Heard the one about the mean old man who made himself the heir in his own will?”) to quips on bad breath (“How does a man with bad breath commit suicide? He puts a bag over his head and asphyxiates himself!”) and comic warnings about cheap honey (“I wouldn’t even be selling it, the salesman eventually admitted, if that mouse hadn’t gone and died in it”).3
The joke about the egghead, the bald man, and the barber is one of the longest in the collection and gives some of the most detailed narrative context (the journey, the risks to the luggage, the boredom of keeping watch, and so on). In it we meet again one of the favorite figures of fun at Rome: the baldy (pp. 51, 132–33, 146). And we are introduced for the first time to another major character in the repertoire of ancient joking, the scholastikos (provisionally translated “egghead”), who takes the lead in almost half the jokes in the Philogelos. His place here, in a trio with the barber and the baldy, echoes all those modern gags that start with similar threesomes: “An Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman went into bar . . .” It is an echo that probably helps to explain why the joke is a favorite with many modern readers of the Philogelos: it really does seem to slip easily into that particular comic convention of our era.4 But not all readers since antiquity have been so amused. Samuel Johnson, publishing one of the earliest English translations of a selection of these gags, struggled to make sense of the punch line here and blamed the manuscript copyists for the obscurity.5
There are jokes that still seem bad to us, frigidi, as the Romans might have said (see pp. 56, 132). In exploring the Philogelos in greater detail, I shall have cause to wonder once more just how much ingenuity is required, or legitimate, in getting (or forcing) ancient gags to provoke a modern chuckle. But I shall also look at some basic questions about this collection. Who might have compiled it, and when? What was it for, and what are the jokes about? There can be no doubt that the jokes in the Philogelos were intended to make readers or listeners laugh; that is clear from the title alone—“Laughter lover.” But what can such a collection of jokes, or of laughter themes, tell us about the society that produced or transmitted them, its priorities, anxieties, and concerns? What role did the Philogelos play in the “laughterhood” of Rome? More than that, what was the purpose (and the history) of a jokebook of this kind? I shall argue that in classical antiquity, the jokebook was characteristically, if not exclusively, Roman. And at the end, I will come close to suggesting—though I will stop just short—that the joke as we understand it was a Roman invention.
CONSTRUCTING THE “LAUGHTER LOVER”
The text of the Philogelos—funny, intriguing, sometimes disappointing—is more complicated than it might at first seem. The fact is that the book we know as the “Laughter lover” never existed in the ancient world, certainly not in the form in which we now read it. Our printed texts go back to half a dozen or so medieval and later manuscripts, which preserve a series of overlapping but not identical jokes. Most of these are shared among several manuscripts (and the title Philogelos is included in several), but no two of them have exactly the same selection. The most complete manuscript version, dating to the eleventh century, is found as part of a much longer anthology of ancient and biblical literature (including popular tales and fables). It contains 260 of the Philogelos jokes, although there are several instances where the same joke, almost word for word, appears twice. The shortest and earliest version, in a tenth-century manuscript, forms the final element of a larger collection of “light literature”6 (including a Greek translation of an Arabic version of a group of Indian fables). The end of this manuscript is lost. There would once certainly have been more jokes, but only seven survive. The first of these occurs in no other manuscript of the collection; the remaining six are found in others—but in a completely different order. This pattern of survival, loss, disruption, and repetition explains my intentional vagueness (“some 265”) about the total number of jokes we are dealing with.7
The modern printed Philogelos is constructed by amalgamating these different manuscript versions. In a sense, we could say that of all classical literature that has “survived”: each play of Euripides, each book of Tacitus is a modern scholarly reconstruction from the different, sometimes contradictory manuscript versions that have come down to us. But the Philogelos is a particularly extreme case of that. Despite great scholarly expertise and ingenuity in trying to understand and see behind the many-stranded manuscript tradition that confronts us, we have no clear idea what the original archetype was like. The one thing of which we can be most confident is that it was not identical to our printed text. We do not even know whether it is appropriate to think in terms of a single archetype for a collection of jokes—which, like traditional collections of recipes, gardening tips, or workout routines, might always exist in multiple, slightly different versions (even if they claim to go back to some semimythical originator or compiler, such as Mrs. Beeton, the Roman Apicius, or, for that matter, Jane Fonda).
There is at least one hint that the versions of “the Philogelos” were even more diverse than they might appear. At one point in his Histories (Chiliades), the twelfth-century Byzantine scholar John Tzetzes quotes a joke that he attributes to the “Laughter lover”; it is a punning quip about a sick man trying to get rid of an unwelcome guest.8 Not only is this not found in any of the surviving manuscripts (or in modern printed editions), but Tzetzes treats Philogelos, or “Laughter lover,” not as the title of the collection but as its author: as he puts it, “Philogelos wrote this somewhere in his book.” Maybe Tzetzes was simply confused or misremembering.9 Or maybe there was another collection of jokes in circulation whose author or compiler went under the name of Philogelos. After all, “Laughter lover” would be an entirely appropriate pen name for a man behind a book of gags.10
But to complicate the picture even more, we find other names firmly associated with the Philogelos, whether as authors or anthologizers. Our most complete manuscript ascribes the collection to “Hierokles and Philagrios, the grammatikos” (maybe “grammarian,” maybe “teacher,” maybe “scholar”); some others, which include smaller selections of jokes, name only “Hierokles.” We have no idea who these men were—despite some desperate modern attempts, on the basis of no evidence at all apart from the name, to pin the collection onto some (probably humorless) fifth-century CE pagan philosopher from Alexandria.11 The Byzantine dictionary-cum-encyclopedia known as the Suda (a repository of recondite information as revealing, and misleading, as Pliny’s Natural History) offers a very different story. There we read that the Philogelos was the work of one Philistion—the name, as we have seen (p. 169), of a famous early imperial mime writer and possibly the pen name (or stage name) of many more. The Suda adds the tantalizing detail that the book was dedicated to a man named Koureus or to a man from Kourion in Cyprus or was the kind of book you would take to the barbershop (koureus)—the lumpy Greek and uncertain manuscript readings are more or less compatible with each translation.12 We have no idea which of these is correct or how to interpret the information (there is no sign of any such dedication in any of the surviving manuscripts, so is the Suda referring to another work of the same name?). If it were the case that a barbershop is mentioned, that might link the Philogelos to that hot spot of ancient popular culture: the place where ordinary men went to get shaved and trimmed and have a chuckle.13
The most economical way of resolving all this conflicting evidence is to imagine a fluid tradition underlying the collection—one that grows and develops while parading different authors and popular gurus as its founding fathers. The Philogelos, in other words, was not a single authored work but a generic title for a set of texts with strong similarities but no fixed archetype or orthodoxy; it was a fluid tradition, constantly adjusted and adapted, shortened or expanded, in new versions and compilations.
The contours of geography and chronology within the collection certainly suggest a mixed origin. For the jokes refer to a wide range of places and cultures across t
he Greco-Roman Mediterranean. We meet characters from the Greek-speaking cities of Abdera, Kyme, and Sidon, but there are also passing references to Rome, the river Rhine, and Sicily.14 Of the only four personal names mentioned—deities and mythical heroes apart—two are Greek (“Drakontides” and “Demeas,” a name common in Greek comedy) and two are Roman (“Scribonia” and “Lollianus”).15 And although the jokes are transmitted in Greek, several of the gags are set against an explicitly Roman cultural background, from currency (denarii) to the ceremonies celebrating the thousandth anniversary of Rome itself.16
The anniversary joke provides the only precisely datable reference in the Philogelos. (“A scholastikos, at the festival that took place in Rome at the millennium [21 April 248 CE], saw a defeated athlete in tears and wanted to cheer him up. ‘Don’t be upset,’ he said. ‘At the next millennial games, you’ll be the winner.’”)17 But it is generally thought, on the basis of the language, that the text as we have it is a couple of centuries later than that—although there are also jokes in our collection that go back considerably earlier than the third century CE or at least point to earlier characters and events.18 Some of them are found, in a more or less identical form, in Plutarch, who wrote at the turn of the first and second centuries CE. For example, one notable joke in the Philogelos about a chatty barber (“A witty guy was asked by a chatty barber, ‘How would you like me to cut your hair?’ ‘In silence’ came the reply”) crops up in Plutarch’s Sayings of Kings and Commanders, where it is ascribed to the fifth-century BCE king Archelaus of Macedon,19 and Plutarch uses another—about (not) lending a scraper in a bathhouse to people who may have turned up without one—to illustrate a usefully jocular method of refusing those who ask you for favors.20
