Reviewing Mary Beard’s Laughter in Ancient Rome, Gregory Hays points to the deeper meaning she finds in their mirth:
On Beard’s telling, ancient laughter is generally associated with unease, especially the unease generated by differences of status and power. In the Life of Aesop, jokes articulate the power relationship of master and slave. Roman comedies feature a recurrent character, the parasite, whose “job” is to laugh at his patron’s jokes—and, when the patron’s back is turned, at the patron. Laughter shapes the relationship between ruler and subject. The murderous pranks of Caligula, Commodus, or Heliogabalus contrast with the “good” emperor’s tolerance of quips, or his willingness to make fun of himself. (“Oh dear,” the dying Vespasian is supposed to have said, “I think I’m about to become a god.”)
Laughter for Beard is also a sign of cracks or fissures in the smooth surface of human identity. The ancients thought of “man” as a category bounded by animals at one end and gods at the other. For Aristotle, man is the only animal that laughs (if lions could understand our jokes they would not find them funny). Laughter links us with the divine, but not always in pleasant ways; in Ovid’s Metamorphoses the gods laugh last, best, and usually at the human characters’ expense. For men, in turn, Beard observes, the most perfectly laughable animal was the monkey: a creature striving to be human but not quite succeeding, like our cheezburger-craving cats or poker-playing dogs. Almost as hilarious was the donkey, particularly when eating; Apuleius’ novel [The Golden Ass] invokes this apparently familiar joke. Yet the donkey’s bray (Latin rudere) is uncomfortably close to the human laugh (ridere). Do they have more in common than we like to think?
Harry Mount compares the humor of ancient Rome to our own:
[I]f you’re expecting to laugh at the things that made Romans laugh, prepared to be disappointed by Mary Beard’s latest book. But, then, Beard isn’t trying to be funny — or even saying that the Romans were particularly funny, either. What she tries to do is nail what made the Romans laugh.
And what she pretty conclusively proves is that, even if we don’t find their jokes funny, the Romans gave us the furniture for our own comedy today. The language of modern humour is rooted in Latin. Iocus is Latin for ‘joke’; facetus, as in facetious, is Latin for ‘witty’; ridiculus, as in ridiculous, meant ‘laughable’.
Roman comic situations were similar to ours, too. Sex figures prominently. Cicero’s list of the different kinds of Roman jokes — based on ambiguity, the unexpected, wordplay, understatement, irony, ridicule, silliness and pratfalls — is pretty close to any comparable modern list.
The Dish 