Lulu Marketplace

"This is not a holiday"
A breezy overview of the subject, covering most of the necessary ground with verve, but marred by omissions and idiosyncrasies, this book is better on Greek than Roman humor. There are three sections, one on theories of humor, laughter and society; the largest on character types; and one on genres. Chapters proceed by topics (e.g., the quack, the sucker, the ironist) and consist of ample excerpts from ancient authors, translated into contemporary colloquial English, with helpful connecting discussions. Slater examines more than just the expected comic authors, such as Aristophanes, by offering generous helpings of others such as Homer, Catullus and Petronius. He... More > argues that ancient comedy is character-driven: “In modern humour, comedy lies in the situation. In ancient humour, it lay in the individual” (p. 65). While this may serve as a starting point, it is certainly overschematic and cannot be accepted without modifications. The emphasis on character does have the virtue of producing a book that goes beyond plot summary, and it occasionally yields good insights, as for example the discussion of Socrates as both quack and ironist (pp. 107–14). Some omissions are baffling. Although the title puns on the Broadway knockoff of Roman New Comedy, only two passages from Plautus are cited and discussed, and Terence is entirely absent. A book subtitled “This is not a Holiday” that devotes a dozen pages to Mesopotamian and Hebrew humor and an entire chapter to Germanic saga should offer more than two pages on the Palliata; someone reading this book would have no idea of the influence of Roman New Comedy from Shakespeare to sitcoms. While Slater maintains that Greek and Roman comedy is character-driven and invoke Theophrastus for four citations, he avoids engagement with Plautus and Terence, the playwrights who gave western comedy its most influential instantiations of “stock characters.” Plautus is quoted only to illustrate specimens of the boaster and parasite (Miles Gloriosus) and the gluttonous cannibal (Mostellaria). Nowhere will a reader find a discussion of the clever slave, and there is no mention of his victims in the section on suckers. Roman verse satire, meanwhile, is ignored. Readers will not see a single graffito or dipinto from Pompeii or Ostia. Too bad, for the “Room of the Seven Sages” (Ostia Regio 3, Insula 10: vissire tacite Chilon docuit subdolus or ut bene cacaret ventrem palpavit Solon, etc.) offers an eloquent example of how Roman bathroom humor could be simultaneously lowbrow and a witty spoof of Greek cultural hegemony. I turn now from omissions to idiosyncrasies. At times the interpretation of literary passages as humorous will strike some not as discovery and elucidation but as willful imposition, or at least insensitivity to frames of genre and culture. All in all a great read by the master of disaster travel writing. < Less