Roman Laughter Week 7: You cannot be serious: humour and Roman oratory from Republic to Empire

Joking and power-play between joke-teller and audience; between characters within the narrative of a joke or comic plot; between the joker and his models/predecessors/doubles/rivals; between the joke-teller and audience on one hand, and the victims of humour on the other; or between rival or polarised or subtly distinguishable social/political/class groups that may be represented by the performers and participants in comedy

Context, context, context At what time? On what occasion? In what place? With what kinds of expectations? Alluding to previous jokes/contexts/events/scenarios? Who is watching? Who is listening? Who is imagined to watch and listen in the future?

Humour and risk: getting it (terribly) wrong Ridiculus?

Humour &/in Politics

Great men’s dicta Collections of the jokes of Cato the Elder and Cicero were apparently circulated during their lifetimes or soon after. Cicero alludes to two collections of his own jokes by contemporaries : one by P.Volumnius Eutrapelus (Fam.7.32), the other by C.Trebonius (Fam.15.21.2). A third collection of Cicero’s jokes, by Cicero’s freedman Tiro, is mentioned by Quintilian (Inst.6.3.5) According to Suetonius (Iul.56.7), Augustus censored Julius Caesar’s collection of jokes, or dicta collectanea.

Humour and/in Roman oratory: 2 key texts Cicero, de Oratore (on the Orator), 2.54-90 Completed in 55BC, when Cicero had withdrawn from public life; the treatise, on what makes an ideal orator, takes the form of a dialogue which takes place in Sept. of 91BC in a villa in Tusculum between L.Licinius Crassus (b.140BC), M.Antonius (two elderly and very famous orators), and younger followers P.Sulpicius Rufus and C.Aurelius Cotta, plus (in bks 2 and 3) Q.Lutatius Catulus and C.Julius Caesar Strabo. The latter, Caesar Strabo, discusses wit in 2.54-90.

Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria (The orator’s education), 6.3 Quintilian was born in Spain in c.35AD, the son of a teacher of rhetoric. After training in law in Rome and Spain, he was called to Rome by the emperor Galba in AD68 to begin work as a teacher of rhetoric. In 78 Vespasian appointed him the first state professor, and Domitian put him in charge of educating two of his nephews. His Institutio oratoria is a comprehensive training program for orators in 12 books, and deals with the problem of the ‘corruption’ of eloquence in first century empire, recommending a return to Ciceronian principles.

Cic. de orat.2.54.1: ‘Jesting (iocus), too and shafts of wit (facetiae) are agreeable (suavis) and often highly effective (vehementer saepe utilis).’ Quint.Inst.6.3.8: ‘Now although laughter might seem to be a trivial matter (res levis), aroused often by buffoons (scurrae), actors of farce, or indeed fools, it nevertheless possesses perhaps the most commanding and irresistible force of all (tamen habet vim nescio an imperiosissimam et cui repugnari minime potest).

Lowering the tone: Humour and the actor-ly body Vulgarity, or lower-class/slave status Self-commodification / prostitution Effeminacy and (therefore) penetrability Lack of self-control Lack of (physical-moral) uprightness Deceptiveness (cf. ‘Greekness’; ‘Womanliness’)

The self-knowledge and self-mastery promised by a rhetorical education emerges as an internally contradictory, highly unstable fantasy. Cf. E.Gunderson (2000) Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World.

The possible functions of humour in oratory Entertain audience; cultivate goodwill in audience (captatio benevolentiae); Lighten/ make palatable more serious themes Persuade Make a bid for power. Perform cleverness and sophistication (cerebral/cultural/class superiority) through wit (urbanitas, ingenium, lepos.) Assert cultural specificity. Perform Roman exemplarity. Cultivate a ‘common man’ pose. Be code for membership of elite male club in which jokes circulate, are remembered, reiterated, reinvented. Demean and destroy opponents. Create and enforce political factions (them and us). Fashion the orator as a man of physical and moral integrity, against an opponent or enemy who is penetrable, grotesque, distorted; (Corbeill, Controlling Laughter, p13, ‘It was through oratory that the Roman moral codes found constant confirmation’) Exploit peer pressure – we can be made to laugh at a demeaned person or group of persons, to give life to hate speech in the context of humour or joking in a way that would not be possible in a more sombre context. Create a space for transgression, release; so much can be excused, forgiven, unleashed under the exculpating banner of the ‘joke’.

The Clintons