1. Week 8: Cicero’s de Oratore: performing wit
Roman Laughter
Week 8: Cicero’s de Oratore: performing wit

2. ‘As a general rule, and speaking roughly, laughter doubtless exercises a useful function.’ p97

3. Oratory and metatheatre…
Can we read the de Oratore not just as a treatise on humour in oratory, but as a witty and humorous performance of its content?
Are ‘low poetry for the theatre’ and ‘elite rhetorical theory, which is all about maintaining the dignity of the aristocratic male’ to be set in opposition? Or is there some slippage, always, between one and the other?
To what extent can we speak of productive contagion between these literary genres / performances?

4. The ideal orator = the orator who employs as much good material from comedy and mime as possible, without looking like a comic actor.

5. Release theory?
Strabo’s speech on humour in oratory in de Orat : an interlude within an interlude? (The dialogue as a whole is posited as an escape from the precarities and dangers of contemporary political life.)

6. Caesar’s Strabo’s mini-treatise on humour: how to read a digression?
Beginnings
Antoninus at 2.234: ‘..in any case, I am worn out by my long and tiring debate, and shall rest, while Caesar is talking, as though at a convenient roadside inn’.
and endings
Caesar Strabo at 2.290: ‘Well, Antoninus, you said you would be glad of a rest at this inn, which is what my speech is, but you must imagine the place you have visited to be in the Pontine marshes, not a very pleasant or salubrious locality, so I advise you to decide that you have had a sufficient rest and to push on to complete the remainder of your journey.’

7. Serious or humorous topic?
‘But remember this, that whatever subjects I might touch upon as being sources of comedy, may equally well, as a rule, be the sources of serious thoughts (graves sententias)’
de orat.2.248
‘Cicero is well aware that the subject of laughter – and its causes – is slippery, dependent on context, and resistant to hard and fast rules.’
Mary Beard, Laughter in Ancient Rome, 117

8. (de orat.2.216-18 – see handout)
Points to note:
Interesting that no Greek authors mentioned…(nb Demosthenes mentioned later at 2.235, cf. Quintilian Inst.6.3.1)
and also that the title/s of these ‘Greek books’ are relayed in Latin (translated into Latin?): de ridiculis
The terms cavillatio and dicacitas do not have Greek equivalents
Is Cicero already sending up the classical scholars who will become obsessed with discovering his Greek sources?
Is the very notion of a textbook tradition of humour implicitly debunked here?

9. Nature vs. culture: can wit/humour be taught?Q:
What kind of relationship can we envisage between humour and knowledge?
(nb: compare Ovid’s Ars Amatoria!)

10. Nature vs culture: a live debate
Note Antoninus reply to Strabo’s initial statement on this at 229: ‘Although you have denied the existence of any art of humour, you did just start something that seemed worth teaching. For you said that regard should be paid to people, topics and occasions, so that the jest should not detract from dignity; Crassus of course always observes this principle as strictly as anyone.’ Crassus comes in and observes, at 232: ‘There is art of these things which Antoninus has been discussing all this time! There is indeed a practice, as he himself told us, of observing various conventions useful for speakers, but if this practice could impart eloquence, wouldn’t everyone be eloquent?’

11. Under the eyes of Roscius, the great comic actor…2.233-4
“Well, then, Crassus,” replied Caesar, “since you require payment from a dinner guest, I will not run away and so give you any occasion for complaint; though I am often astonished at the impudence of those who act upon the stage while Roscius is a spectator of their attitudes; for who can make the least motion without Roscius seeing his imperfections? So I shall now have to speak first on wit in the hearing of Crassus, and to teach like a swine*, as they say, that orator of whom Catulus said, when he heard him lately, that other speakers ought to be fed on hay.” *‘teach like a swine’: an allusion to the proverb whereby an ignorant person (a pig) attempts to teach an expert.

12. Strabo’s treatise, outlined at 2.235
‘However, not to detain you any longer, I will deliver my sentiments very briefly on this department of eloquence in general. Concerning laughter, there are five things which are subjects of consideration: one, ‘What it is;’ another, ‘Whence it originates;’ a third, ‘Whether it becomes the orator to wish to excite laughter;’ a fourth, ‘To what degree;’ a fifth, ‘What are the several kinds of the ridiculous?’