What Was Considered “Funny” 2000 Years Ago?

A story left to us by the famous Roman historian Livy, tells of a man known only as Ishmael who in the year 4 CE traveled the Near East showcasing an astonishing mule he’d discovered who could talk.  Not only could this remarkable animal talk, it delivered the most hilarious one-liners the people of the ancient countryside had ever heard.

From Jerusalem to Damascus, Raphana to Agrippina, audiences thrilled to Ishmael and Bathsheba (as Ishmael had come to name his mule) when they came to town, showering them with gifts, the best lodging, and food and wine befitting an Emperor.   They were a sensation!  And for a time, things went swimmingly well for the two.

But then Ishmael decided it was time to take the act to the big city, to Rome itself.  (If we can make it there, he told Bathsheba, we can make it anywhere.)  Managing to get his “Bathsheba the Talking Mule” routine booked at the famous Bedouin Room at the Theatre of Pompey, the duo went on just before sunset, right after the very popular, Crispus the Juggling Charioteer.  And according to Livy, the anticipation in the room was like nothing the people of Rome had ever witnessed before.

But no sooner had the two launched into their routine when someone from the audience shouted out the fateful, “Hey!  He’s just talking out of his ass!!”  And since willful deception of the citizenry was a capital offence in ancient Rome, the mod responded by stoning Ishmael to death, and dragging poor Bathsheba off to the local temple for sacrifice.  So the question now begging examination is, if 4 CE Rome wasn’t quite ready for ventriloquism and stand-up comedy, what was considered funny?

While the Western perspective of humor is generally attributed to the great philosopher Plato–defined as the tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement–the term actually derives from humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks which taught that the balance of fluids in the human body, known as humors, control human health and emotion.  Exemplified by the works of playwrights Menander, Philemon, and Diphilus, Greek comedies played on the fears and shortcomings of the ordinary man (kinda like popular comedies of early American TV).

From the Roman perspective, however, the true essence of humor is ridicule, and best left to intellectuals to mete out.  Thus, while Roman satirists also held vices, foolishness, common abuses, and human frailties up to ridicule, the intent was to shame individuals–and society itself–into committing self-improvement.  While superficially humorous, high-brow Roman satire aimed at constructive social criticism, with wit as its weapon.  But, there was, of course, low-brow humor as well.

As such, Roman humor typically targeted scapegoats such as slaves and eunuchs, people from certain towns (residents of a particular city named Abdera were frequent targets due to their supposed over-abundance of stupidity), men with bad breath, people with hernias, and especially, absent-minded intellectuals.

For example, one joke of the time recorded in a book of jokes called Philogelos (literally, the Laughter Lover), pokes fun at an absent-minded professor about to embark on a trip abroad.  Asked by a friend to bring back two 15-year-old slave boys, the professor responds, “Fine.  And if I can’t find two 15-year-olds I will bring you one 30-year-old.”

Similarly, there’s one about a barber, a bald man, and a scholar who go on a journey together.  At night, they each take turns guarding their camp while the others sleep.  One night the barber, bored during his shift, amuses himself by shaving the professor’s head.  Then when he wakes the professor to spell him, the professor feels his shaved head and thinks, ‘The barber is so stupid he woke up the bald man instead of me!’

Much like humor today, jokes of 2000 years ago were often quite crude, racist, and off-color, as this one illustrates:  A senator’s son gets a slave pregnant.  After she gives birth, the senator suggests that the child be killed (a common practice of the time), to which his son replies, “First have your own children killed, and then tell me to kill mine.”

Another goes: Heard the one about the Roman who buys a slave only to have the slave drop dead a short while afterwards?  The man goes back to the seller to complain and the owner replies, “Well, he didn’t die when I owned him!”

Still other jokes strike a familiar, seemingly timeless theme: A man is returning from his wife’s funeral when a passer-by asks, “Who has gone to rest?”  To this the man replies: “Me! I’m finally alone and allowed to rest!”

Along with literal and verbal humor, just as today, graffiti was a common method used by aspiring humorists to express their funny side, exemplified by this wall etching:  “Everybody who came by scratched something on these walls.  I’m the only one who didn’t do it.”

Similarly, a disgruntled patron in Pompeii left a comment on a tavern wall that reads: “Landlord, you drink unmixed wine, but you serve your guests water instead.”  (The hidden insult here is that drinking unmixed wine was considered a barbaric habit, and thought to lead to certain madness.)

And yes, bathroom wall doodling was apparently just as popular then as it is today.  The so-called “Room of the Seven Sages” in Ostia (the harbor city of Rome) has painted walls depicting seven of the greatest Greek philosophers, to which humorous thoughts concerning their bathroom habits have been etched next to their respective images: “The cunning Chilon taught how to flatulate unnoticed,” and “No one will give you a long lecture, Priscianus, as long as you use the sponge,” (the sponge being the Roman equivalent of toilet paper).

And interestingly enough, while many of the Classic satirists often penned pointed jibes at various Roman officials, politicians apparently displayed their own unique sense of humor as shown by the Emperor Domitian’s stating that nobody believes an emperor has discovered a conspiracy to kill him, unless he’s actually been killed.  (Not so funny for Domitian himself, however, who’d uncovered several conspiracies against Rome in his lifetime and had sentenced so many to death that he was deemed paranoid and subsequently all but ignored.  He, of course, had the last laugh in that it was by assassination that he met his demise.)

Likewise, Domitian’s father, Emperor Vespasian, allegedly showed a morbid, if not brave sense of humor on his death bed when he said “Oh, my, I think I’m going to become a god now,” (alluding to the custom of having Roman emperors deified after their deaths).

And so as not to short-change the poets of the times, here’s one of the more popular from Martial, famous for his epigrams:

Paula wants to marry me, I don’t want to marry Paula: she’s old.

I’d be willing, if she were older.

And one more for the road…

May the earth be light upon you, and may you be covered by

soft sand, lest the dogs be unable to dig you out.

And of course, no examination of 2000-year-old humor would be complete without a major nod to the immortal Plautus, perhaps the best known Roman comic playwright, who wrote more than 150 comedies–many of which explored the exploits of horny young men sowing their wild oats–whose plots can be recognized in several of Shakespeare’s comedies, as well as the Stephen Sondheim play, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (and subsequent 1966 Richard Lester film of the same name starring Zero Mostel, Jack Gilford, Buster Keaton, Phil Silvers, Michael Crawford, Michael Hordern, and Roy Kinnear).