Chapter 30
Laughter
Ralph M. Rosen,
Ralph M. Rosen
Search for more papers by this authorRalph M. Rosen,
Ralph M. Rosen
Search for more papers by this authorBook Editor(s):Pierre Destrée,
Penelope Murray,
Pierre Destrée
Search for more papers by this authorPenelope Murray
Search for more papers by this authorSummary
This chapter examines how laughter was conceptualized by ancient Greek and Roman authors within, and as a response to, various comic literary genres. These authors reveal a coherent set of ancient attitudes about laughter which reflect a number of specific aesthetic problems and anxieties associated with it. The second part addresses the philosophical discourse about laughter found in Plato and Aristotle. Like many other philosophers of Classical antiquity after them, these two were profoundly aware of the complexity of laughter, and understood that the artistic mechanisms for drawing laughter from an audience were nearly always fraught with the potential for misunderstanding, and, in some cases, even danger.
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Further Reading
- Halliwell (2008) offers a recent comprehensive overview of laughter in Greek literature and culture through late antiquity, which also subsumes much of his earlier work on this topic. For Roman laughter, see Beard 2014. For laughter in Roman visual culture, see Clarke 2007. Two useful French essay collections can be found in Trédé-Boulmer, Hoffmann, and Auvray-Assayas (1998) and Desclos (2000). Wide-ranging and eclectic, the three volumes of Jäkel and Timonen (1994, 1995, 1997), address topics from Greek and Roman literary, philosophical, cultural, and psychological perspectives. The views of Plato and Aristotle on laughter are well treated in the aforementioned studies, in addition to which one should consult Mader (1977) (on laughter in Plato) and the relevant essays in Dillon and Brisson (2010) on Plato's discussion of comedy in the Philebus. On Aristotle's views of comedy in the Poetics, Heath (1989) remains classic, if somewhat unorthodox. Destrée (2009) extends some of Heath's arguments with discussion of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. The Tractatus Coislinianus, thought by some to derive from Aristotle's lost second book of the Poetics in which he allegedly focused on comedy, has been sympathetically treated by Janko 2002 [1984], although his arguments for authenticity remain controversial.
