Ancient Egyptian humour

What the ancient Egyptians laughed at

Not everything we laugh at we think of as humorous, and what is considered

amusing changes from place to place and from time period to time period. We should
therefore be cautious when talking about ancient Egyptian humour. Of course they
smiled and laughed, told jokes and funny stories, but their sense of the hilarious was
not identical to ours.

There are a number of topics which seem to have been thought of as funny
throughout the ages. Much as it pains us politically correct westerners, we have
always laughed at other people's infirmities or idiosyncrasies. The blind, hunchbacks,
dwarfs and retarded have been butts for our jokes. Schadenfreude, the pleasure of
delighting in somebody else's misfortune, may not be quite as cruel as it used to be,
but we still laugh at somebody slipping on the proverbial banana skin. Bodily
functions too have tickled our funny bone. Not quite as down to earth has been satire,
the art of poking fun at the powers that be; and rarest of all has always been the gentle
flower of self-mockery.

Not every time we read about laughter in the sources, the mirth was the result of
something we would think of as funny. Piye, on his victorious advance through Egypt,
had many occasions to be pleased:

Behold, [he] besieges Herakleopolis, he has completely invested it, not letting comers-
out come out, and not letting goers-in go in, fighting every day. He measured it off in
its whole circuit, every prince knows his wall; he stations every man of the princes
and rulers of walled towns over his (respective) portion
Then [his majesty] heard [the message] with courageous heart, laughing, and joyous
of heart.
The Victory Stela of King Piye
J. H. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt Part Four, §818f.

Teasing can be fun if it is good humored, but mocking is generally intended to hurt. In
the tale of Truth and Falsehood the son of Truth grew up without knowing his father
and was mocked by the other children because of it:

"Whose son are you? You don't have a father!" And they reviled him and mocked him:
"Hey, you don't have a father!"
Truth and Falsehood

Laughter is a joy in itself. But sometimes it can be used to achieve some purpose. In
the tale of Princess Ahura the girl convinces her father Merneptah to let her marry her
brother Naneferkaptah:

I said to him (i.e. her father): "Let me marry the son of a general, and let him marry
the daughter of another general, so that our family may increase!" I laughed and
Pharaoh laughed.
Setne Khamwas and Naneferkaptah
Lichtheim vol.3 p.128
When looking at ancient Egyptian pictures or reading old stories we get the feeling
that we have a pretty good idea of what they found funny. Still, some caution is called
for.
Predynastic period (Naqada I–early Naqada II), (ca. 3900–3650 B.C.)
Provenance unknown
Polished red pottery
H. 9.8 cm (3.9 in.), Diam. 13.5 cm (5.3 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

While a cute bowl with human feet like the one on the
right will amuse us, a sight like this may have had much
less of an effect on the ancient Egyptians who were used to
much of their furniture legs having feet, or rather hooves or paws.

Like beauty, funniness lies in the eye of the beholder. One man's joke may well be
perceived to be an insult by somebody else. The ancient Egyptians were as likely as us
to take umbrage at becoming the butt of a joke as a New Kingdom scribe learned to
his chagrin.

Satire
Different social classes will laugh at different things. While the oppressed working
classes would see the funny sides of their "betters", upper class scribes must have
thought the descriptions of the various tradesmen in the Satire of the Trades to be
hilarious:
I do not see a stoneworker on an important errand or a goldsmith in a place to which
he has been sent, but I have seen a coppersmith at his work at the door of his furnace.
His fingers were like the claws of the crocodile, and he stank
more than fish excrement
Satire of the Trades

Scene from the Erotic Turin Papyrus

There is a hint of social mockery in the Erotic Turin

Papyrus where the limp, over-sized member of the exhausted
lover is crowned with a lotus flower (ostensibly the flower which
is adorning the head of the girl supporting the man's buttocks). These lotus flowers are
often depicted in the genteel party scenes of the New Kingdom bourgeoisie, hovering
above the heads of the guests.
While in animal
cartoons many
vignettes are
innocuous with hares
cooking and
donkeys playing the
harp, it is a cat (again decorated with a lotus flower) which copulates with a goose in
the Erotic Turin Papyrus. Wolves act as flute playing goatherds, and a cat drives geese
in front of it in the picture of a British Museum papyrus above. One also wonders
what the outcome of the game of senet between the lion and the gazelle is going to be.
The darts of satire were sometimes aimed at kings and gods. Both Menkaure and
Ahmose II figure in tales about drunkenness. According to a story Herodotus heard,
[6]

Khufu prostituted his own daughter, and she was so successful at it that she could
build her own pyramid:
Cheops moreover came, they said, to such a pitch of wickedness, that being in want of
money he caused his own daughter to sit in the stews, and ordered her to obtain from
those who came a certain amount of money (how much it was they did not tell me):
and she not only obtained the sum appointed by her father, but also she formed a
design for herself privately to leave behind her a memorial, and she requested each
man who came in to give her one stone upon her building: and of these stones, they
told me, the pyramid was built which stands in front of the great pyramid in the
middle of the three, each side being one hundred and fifty feet in length.
Herodotus, Euterpe
In The Contendings of Horus and Seth the gods look to us like a pretty ridiculous
bunch of fuddy-duddies, incapable of coming to a decision and then enforcing it. But
was this how the ancient Egyptians perceived it? Maybe they were incapable of seeing
their gods in such a light, and to them this was a conflict so difficult to solve that it
took decades of deliberations.

Puns
There are cultures which value verbal wit more than others. The English today are
very fond of punning, and so were the ancient Egyptians. Their writings are quite
often spiked with word plays, hidden behind the somewhat rebus-like structure of
their script.

Incongruities
 To the ancient Egyptians, used to depict their gods in both human and animal
shapes, the gulf between humans and animals must have been smaller than it is to us.
Still it tickled their fancy to look at pictures of animals behaving like humans or listen
to animal fables reflecting human behaviour. What else would a powerful lion do but
laugh, when a lowly mouse promised to save him in exchange for being spared:

The lion laughed at the mouse and said: "What is it that you could [do] in fact! Is
there anyone on earth who would attack me?" But he swore an oath before him,
saying: "I shall make you escape from your misfortune on your bad day!" Now
although the lion considered the words of the mouse as a joke, he reflected, "If I eat
him I shall indeed not be sated," and he released him.
The Lion in Search of Man
Lichtheim vol.3 p.158
But the joke was on the lion in the end, when he was caught in a trap and the mouse
returned to save him by gnawing a hole into the net holding him.

Foolishness
In the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor it is a god mocking a mortal, but nobody
needs to feel ashamed for looking foolish to a god in the vein of Ankhsheshonq's
maxim Before the god the strong and the weak are a joke . As the sailor tells his
[2]

story:

Then he (i.e. the snake god of the island) laughed at me for the things I had said,
which seemed foolish to him.
The shipwrecked sailor
Lichtheim vol.1 p.167
On the other hand, being laughed at by mere mortals because of one's stupidity or
ignorance is a different cup of tea altogether, not something one would proudly relate
to one's cronies. Such stories are rarely told in the first person singular:

And there was a priest there called Nesiptah; and as Naneferkaptah went into a
temple to pray, it happened that he went behind this priest, and was reading the
inscriptions that were on the chapels of the gods. And the priest mocked him and
laughed. So Naneferkaptah said to him, "Why are you laughing at me?"
And he replied, "I was not laughing at you, or if I happened to do so, it was at your
reading writings that are worthless.
Tale of Princess Ahura
Irony was used in a letter to the scribe Amenemope. At first the writer gives
fulsome praise to the scribe for his 'accomplishments' ...

A scribe (writing) in every style(?); there is nothing that he does not know. Men
inquire after his response in quest of choice words. Keen of wit, patient of heart,
loving mankind; rejoicing at deeds of Justice, he turns his back upon iniquity. [The
scribe of steeds(?) ///////// Amenemope, son of the steward Mose, the revered.]
A Satirical Letter
... and later demolishes his reputation by citing examples of his ignorance, lack of
courtesy, and incompetence. Ankhsheshonq sums up the Egyptian attitude towards
foolishness in an aphorism:

The reward of the fool and the inferior man is the laughter that falls on him.
The Instruction of Ankhsheshonq
M. Lichtheim vol.3 p.205

Excesses
The ancient Egyptians liked their tipple. Beer was drunk by
everybody, and, weak as it was, it had its effect on those who
overdid it. Overeating was probably not much of a problem among
the populace who often had just enough food to survive. Thus
when an upper class persons vomited because of excessive drinking and eating, their
discomfort must have been especially enjoyable to the man in the street.

Nakedness and Sex

Neither nudity nor sex were funny in themselves . Workers labouring under
[4]

conditions where their clothes might get spoiled apparently took them off and were
often depicted naked. The phalli of gods and the pudenda of goddesses too were
represented in contexts of creation.
But nudity can also be used in the pursuit of one's aims, and a little laughter can
make all the difference. Thus Hathor, in an attempt to expedite the proceedings in
the dispute between Horus and Seth, undressed in front of Re-Harakhte:
After a considerable while Hathor, Lady of the Southern Sycamore, came and stood
before her father, the Universal Lord, and she exposed her vagina before his very
eyes. Thereupon the great god laughed at her.
The Contendings of Horus and Seth
It has been suggested that the god's laughter was a
euphemism for intercourse, and his mirth was due to sexual
gratification. Maybe so, but why would the intercrural
intercourse between Seth and Horus be recounted with relish
and in quite some detail later on?
The Erotic Turin Papyrus depicts sex scenes in which the
male is caricatured. It will look to most of us like a satire, but
some have thought that it must have a deeper, spiritual
meaning .[1]
 "Snow White and the seven dwarfs"
Brooklyn Museum

This has also been claimed for the little statue on the right to which the nickname of
"Snow White and the seven dwarfs" has been given.

Grimaces
Pulling faces is a time-honoured way for making children
laugh (or cry, as the case may be). The grimaces of the god Bes
and his pulled out tongue were intended to frighten evil spirits
and protect his human charges. The dwarf god was a popular
deity spreading good cheer among grown-ups and children alike.
According to Scott B. Noegel it was thought that when babies
smiled to themselves this was due to Bes making funny faces at
them . [5]

Glass head
Ptolemaic (UC 22258)
Source: Petrie Museum website

Infirmities and physical peculiarities

There are depictions of well-respected dwarfs going about their business, and of
[3]

fat people enjoying the prosperity their obesity suggested. But apparently not all
Egyptians were enlightened enough to accept people for their inner worth. These had
to be exhorted to mend their ways:
Do not laugh at a blind man, Nor tease a dwarf.
The Instruction of Amenemope
Lichtheim vol.2 p.160
The peculiar shape of the queen of Punt, who met the
Egyptian traders sent by Hatshepsut, aroused the interest of
many and her depiction made by Hatshepsut's artists was
copied by people of varying drawing ability. One may surmise
that this was not due to an interest in ethnography.
Queen of Punt

A small donkey depicted close to the queen was described by an inscription: The
donkey that had to carry the queen . But the Egyptians, used to donkeys burdened
[5]

with heavy loads, may have thought less of the incongruity of this rather sizable
woman sitting on a scrawny donkey, but rather of a queen riding a donkey at all.
Weakness, whether physical or moral, was risible. In a world where magic was
thought to be as real as matter, there was no place for despondency:
The moment Si-Osire heard these words he laughed for a long time. Setne said to him:
"Why do you laugh?" He said: "I laugh because you are lying down with a grieving
heart on account of such a small matter! Rise up, my father Setne! I can read the
document brought to Egypt without opening it, and I shall learn what is written in it
without breaking its seal!"
Setne Khamwas and Si-Osire
Lichtheim vol.3 p.143

Slapstick
There is a large measure of cruelty involved when we enjoy the misfortune of
others. A hammer dropping on a man's head, or someone falling into the water are still
funny in our eyes when nobody gets badly hurt - and people in antiquity seem to have
enjoyed such little misfortunes happening to somebody else, too.

The ancient Egyptians, to whom beatings were not a last resort when they wanted
to convey their displeasure to a subordinate, were perhaps more inured to seeing
physical suffering than we are - and more accepting of it. But they set limits to what
was permissible and funny. In the fable The Mouse as Vizier a mouse, weak in every
respect, was chosen to become vizier to the lion, but after behaving in an excessively
cruel way he was deposed and the lion
... proclaimed loudly: "From this hour onward, all mice shall disappear from the
fields and shall live underground only!"
Thus the king spoke and thus it happened. This is the reason why mice live in
subterranean holes to this day
Maat was not to be trifled with, though of course it was the powers that be which
interpreted it, thus Piye, who saw himself as the rightful king of Egypt and defender
of Maat, could laugh at the discomfiture of his enemies, while the mouse, servant of
the lion king, became an object of contempt and derision.

Footnotes:
[1] And they are not referring to the exclamation of "O god!" which often concludes such proceedings.
[2] M. Lichtheim, The Instruction of Ankhsheshonq, Vol.3 p. 194
[3] Dwarfs seem to have held a special fascination for the ancient Egyptians, perhaps because they looked somewhat
like their god Bes, popular as a protective deity. Pepi II, still a child at the time, was all excited at the news that his
expedition to the south was bringing with them a dwarf. He wrote in a letter:
Thou (i.e. the leader of the expedition Harkhuf) hast said in this thy
letter, that thou hast brought a dancing dwarf of the god from the
land of the spirits, like the dwarf which the treasurer of the god
Burded brought from Punt in the time of Isesi.
J. H. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, Part One, § 351
One of the few ancient mechanical toys to survive is one of three
dancing dwarf puppets which can be activated by pulling on
strings.
[4] Of course we cannot be completely sure of that. The upper
classes who left us most of the records we rely on may have considered naked men labouring in the swamps and
fields to be hilarious. But there are no obvious clues to such an attitude in the records themselves.
[5] Scott B. Noegel quoted in Jennifer Viegas, "Ancient Egyptians Were Jokesters," Discovery News, 2.6.2004
(http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20040531/egypthumor.html)
[6] The tale of Ahmose and the Sailor, Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae website, G. Vittmann, ed.: Demotische
Textdatenbank, Akademie für Sprache und Literatur Mainz => literarische Texte => Erzählungen u.a". => Amasis
und der Schiffer (P. Bibl. Nat. 215, Vso a)

Bibliography:
J. H. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt
Emma Brunner-Traut, Tiergeschichten aus dem Pharaonenland, Mainz, Zabern, 2000
Adolf Erman, The literature of the ancient Egyptians; poems, narratives, and manuals of instruction, from the third
and second millennia B. C., London, Methuen & co. ltd., 1927
Alan H. Gardiner, Egyptian Hieratic Texts - Series I: Literary Texts of the New Kingdom, Part I, Leipzig 1911
Herodotus, Histories Vol. 2: Euterpe
William Kelly Simpson (ed.), The Literature of Ancient Egypt, 1972
M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 1972
Eva March Tappan, ed., The World's Story: A History of the World in Story, Song and Art, , Vol. III, Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1914
Humour in the Ancient World

Laughing Legionaries

An Abderite saw a eunuch and asked him how many kids he had. When that guy said that he didn’t
have the balls, so as to be able to have children, the Abderite asked when he was going to get the
balls (Philagelos, #114)
Is that funny to you? A little? Or does it
make you scratch your head and wonder
if I’ve gone off the deep end?

It’s not my joke, thankfully. In truth, I’m

not a very funny person, but I do enjoy a
good laugh, as many of us do.

The joke above is actually a Roman joke

about 2000 years old. Yes, that old. It’s one
of 250-odd jokes in the oldest joke book in
the world known as the Philagelos, or ‘The
Laughter Lover’. It is thought that this text
is a compendium of jokes over several
hundred years. The earliest manuscript is
thought to date to the 4th or 5th centuries
A.D.

I’m not funny!

Humour in the ancient world is not really something I’ve thought about in my
writing and research. If there has ever been humour in my books, it has been a
reflection of my own modern perceptions of what humour is, or should be.
Otherwise, my modern readers would be left scratching their heads.

A colleague of mine recently shared a CBC interview with eminent classicist and
historian Mary Beard on the subject of her book about humour in the Roman world
entitled: Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up

Mary Beard

The wonderful interview with Mary Beard got me to thinking about this little-thought-of
aspect of life in the ancient world.
Here is the sound clip for the interview which runs about 50 minutes .

As I mentioned, I’m not funny, so until recently my idea of humour in the ancient
world was partly based on the musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the
Forum by the brilliant Stephen Sondheim. The latter is not a completely inaccurate view
since the story is based on the farces of the Roman playwright Plautus (251–183 BC).
Bawdiness played a large role from the theatre to the marching songs of Rome’s
legionaries.
Slap stick comedy was a part of humour in the ancient world, but in the interview
Mary Beard has put forth the idea that there are other aspects of ancient humour
which we might not, or cannot, understand.

A professional beggar had been letting his

girlfriend think that he was rich and of noble
birth. Once, when he was getting a handout
at the neighbor’s house, he suddenly saw her.
He turned around and said: “Have my
dinner-clothes sent here.” (Philagelos, #106)
When it comes to many ancient jokes,
our cultural and temporal disconnect
make them simply ‘not funny’.

Another reason why the humour of some

ancient jokes may be lost on us is that
perhaps the medieval monks copying
these down simply made mistakes or
interpreted them incorrectly.

Salve, Titus! Heard any good jokes lately?

Mary Beard points out that there is no real way to know how ancient people
laughed either. This is a bit of a trickier concept to wrap one’s head around. What
were ancients’ reactions to laughing? Did they have uncontrollable laughter?

My thought is that yes, maybe our jokes are different from what Roman jokes
were, just like how some people find Monty Python funny (I know I do!), while
others wonder what the big deal is. I also think that we are perhaps not so
different in our physical reactions. For example, there is the quote from Cassius
Dio, whom I have used as a source for much of my writing, and who Mary Beard
uses as an example.

Anybody heard the one about the intellectual?

Here is a portion from the Roman History in which Cassius Dio and other senators
are watching Emperor Commodus slay ostriches in the amphitheatre. As we know,
Commodus was off his head, and prone to killing whomever he wanted.
This fear was shared by all, by us senators as well as by the rest. And here is another thing
that he did to us senators which gave us every reason to look for our death. Having killed
an ostrich and cut off his head, he came up to where we were sitting, holding the head in
his left hand and in his right hand raising aloft his bloody sword; and though he spoke not
a word, yet he wagged his head with a grin, indicating that he would treat us in the same
way. And many would indeed have perished by the sword on the spot, for laughing at him
(for it was laughter rather than indignation that overcame us), if I had not chewed some
laurel leaves, which I got from my garland, myself, and persuaded the others who were
sitting near me to do the same, so that in the steady movement of our armies we might
conceal the fact that we were laughing. (Cassius Dio, Roman History LXXIII)
What a sight that must have been! Even though it meant certain death, Dio and the
other senators had to chew laurels so as not to give in to what was presumably an
urge to laugh hysterically.

A young man said to his libido-driven wife: “What should we do, darling? Eat or have sex?”
And she replied: “You can choose. But there’s not a crumb in the house.” (Philagelos, #244)

How about some tickles?

Bawdiness creeps in all the time in ancient humour, and why not? Everyone (well
almost everyone) likes a sex joke. If you peruse the jokes in the Philagelos, you’ll
see that many of them have to do with sex.
And this didn’t just apply to the Romans. The ancient Greeks found sex and
humour to be comfortable bedfellows (no pun intended).

I remember going to an evening performance of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata at the

ancient theatre of Epidaurus one summer night. It was a beautiful setting with the
mountains as a backdrop to the ancient odeon, the sun setting orange and red, and
then a great canopy of silver stars in the sky above.
Lysistrata is a play about a woman’s determination to stop the Peloponnesian War
by withholding sex from her husband, and getting all other women to do the same.
It seemed quite the political statement on the waste and futility of war, as well as
ancient gender issues.

You’re not getting any until you end this stupid war!
But then the men, who had not had sex for a long time, came prancing about the
stage with giant, bulbous phalluses dangling between their legs, moaning with the
pain of their ancient world blue balls. Some of the crowd roared with laughter,
others tittered in embarrassment, and still others sat stalk still like the statues in
the site museum.

Perhaps that is the point? Maybe in ancient times, just as today, some jokes were
funny to some and not to others? Are we that different from our ancient Roman
and Greek counterparts?

Ms. Beard points out that ancient writers like Cicero speak of the different types of
humour. There is derision (laughing at others), puns (word play), incongruity
(pairing of opposites), and humour as a release from tension.

An incompetent astrologer cast a boy’s horoscope and said: “He will be a lawyer, then a
city-official, then a governor.” But when this child died, the mother confronted the
astrologer: “He’s dead — the one you said was going to be a lawyer and an official and a
governor.” “By his holy memory,” he replied, “if he had lived, he would have been all of
those things!” (Philgelos, #202)
Maybe we’re not so different after all?

She also mentions tickling, and how Romans are said to have felt ticklish on their
lips, a part that has been highly erotized today. Prostitutes, she says, were said to
be ‘big laughers’.
I think you’re hilarious, Lupa!
Hmmm.

I don’t frequent brothels, but perhaps that is as true today as it was 1500 years ago.

This is a much bigger topic than I had expected. It’s fascinating to think of laughter
in an ancient context.

Do I find ancient jokes funnier than before? Not really, though I do find they reveal
something more of Roman society.

Will I start inserting ancient jokes in my writing?

No, unless I too find it funny.

The reason for this is that when an author writes humour in historical fiction, if he
or she wants his or her audience to actually find it funny, it will need to resonate
with our modern-day humour and ways of laughter. The audience has to recognize
it to an extent. That doesn’t mean a joke that modern readers will understand can’t
be cloaked in ancient garb.

At the end of the day, perhaps it is as simple as this: there will always be crap
jokes, but it is the funny ones that stand out, that will tickle you and set you to
laughing.
Wednesday, 4 March 2009
Humour in The Ancient World

The urge to laugh is a primal urge, present from the dawn of human history. Even apes
appreciate humour.

In the early 20th century,

anthropologists Schulze and Chewings, got
caught in a terrifying thunderstorm they
thought would scare the
Australian aboriginals, who had been
genetically and culturally isolated from the
rest of the world for at least 35,000 years.
Rather than being afraid they burst out
laughing at an unusually loud or peculiar
clap of thunder.

One of the Oldest Jokes in the World Comes from Sumer in Modern Iraq.

"Something, which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in
her husband's lap."

Ancient Egyptian Humour

Physician jokes can be found

already in ancient Egypt.
The ancient Egyptians were
very new media savvy with
catchy symbols and their jokes
are often cartoons. Political
satire, scatological humor, sex
jokes, slapstick, and animal-
based parodies; we should say –
laugh like an Egyptian!
Erotic Turin Papyrus from the Ramesside period (1292-1075 B.C.E.)

In The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor the sailor tells his story: Then he (i.e. the snake god of
the island) laughed at me for the things I had said, which seemed foolish to him.

Ankhsheshonq in the 4th century BCE quotes a much older saying “Before the god the strong
and the weak are a joke.” (Lichtheim 2006)

Ancient Greek Humour

The "Philogelos" or "Laughter-Lover" (manuscript dating to the 10th century but with older
jokes probably from 250 CE) is an anthology of 265 jokes.

 "Wishing to teach his donkey not to eat, a pedant did not offer
him any food. When the donkey died of hunger, he said "I've had a
great loss. Just when he had learned not to eat, he died."
 “An intellectual who had had an operation on his uvula (vital for
speech) was ordered by his doctor not to talk for a while. Then he said
to each caller, ‘Please don’t be offended that my slave greeted you
instead of me; I’m under doctor’s orders not to talk’”.
 “An intellectual was on a sea voyage when a big storm blew up,
causing his slaves to weep in terror. ‘Don’t cry,’ he consoled them, ‘I
have freed you all in my will’” .

There is also great wisdom in ancient Greece about the therapeutic

value of humour. Hippocrates (460-370 BC) advices physicians to bring
laughter to the patient rather than dour faces. This is something many
modern physicians seem to have forgotten.

Ancient Roman Humour

Romans were rather funny and definitely not serious and pompous
statues as later history would have them. The ruins of places like
Pompei are full of rather naughty graffiti and lewd jokes. Here're
two sarcastic and macho ones from ancient Rome.

A misogynist is taking care of his departed wife's burial. Someone

asks him "Who is it that rests in peace here?" The man answers:
"Me, now that I'm rid of her!"
A man tell another man: "I had your wife, without paying a penny". The man replied: "It's
my duty as a husband to couple with such a monstrosity. What made you do it?"

Humour in The Hebrew Bible

Hershey Friedman, Professor at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York has
written about how humour brings man closer to God in the Bible.

First, there is the idea that God has a sense of humour.

 In Psalms (2:4), "He who sits in heaven will laugh, the Lord will mock them."
 In Psalms (37:13): "My Lord laughs at him for He sees that his day is coming."
 In Psalms (59:9): "But as for You, God, You laugh at them; You mock all nations."
Then there is sarcasm: (Exodus 14:11): "Was there a lack of graves in Egypt, that you took us
away to die in the wilderness?"

There is much humorous imagery:

 "As a gold ring in a swine’s snout, so is a

beautiful woman from whom sense has
departed" (Proverbs 11:22).
 "It is better to live in a desert than with a
contentious and angry woman"(Proverbs 21:19).

The First Christian Joke Books

Monks continued the tradition of using humour and

riddles as a teaching tool in the Ioca Monachorum,
a text that dates to 700 A.D.
 Who was not born but died? (Adam).
 What man can kill another man without
being punished? (A doctor).

Japanese Jokes

Heiyo Nagashima, Japan Society for

Laughter and Humor Studies, writes how
the Japanese kobanashi or joke books
started having Chinese jokes in the 18th
century and American jokes in the 19th
century. He claims that the Japanese do
not tell each other Japanese jokes but
foreign jokes.
Chinese Jokes

Ancient China was full of delightful

humour with life insights, which have not
dated over the centuries. We have
delightful jokes from the Ming dynasty
(1368-1644).

On his birthday, an official's subordinates

chipped in to give him a life-sized solid
gold rat, since he was born in the year of
the rat (each year of a twelve year cycle
has a different animal). The official
thanked them and then asked, "Did you
know that my wife's birthday is coming
up? She was born in the year of the ox."
A heavily laden woodcutter stumbled into
the local doctor on a narrow path. When the doctor drew back his fist to hit him, the
woodcutter dropped to his knees and begged, “Please kick me instead.” 
A bystander asked,
“Why would you rather him kick you?” 
The terrified woodcutter replied, “Treatment by his
hands would be much deadlier than with his feet!”

Indian Humour

Ancient India abounds with

wit and humour. Even the
world’s greatest epic, The
Mahabharata says of itself

“What is found herein may

also be found in other
sources, What is not found
herein does not matter.”

Ancient India has an extensive

tradition of moral tales.

A greengrocer and a potter

jointly hired a camel and each filled one side of the pannier with his goods. The camel as he
went along the road took a mouthful every now and then, as he had a chance, from the
greengrocer's bag of vegetables. This provoked a laugh from the potter, who thought he had
the best of the bargain. But the time came for the camel to sit, and he naturally sat on the
heavier side, bearing down on the pots, and also to have his mouth free to eat from the bag
of greens. The pots in the bag all broke, and then the greengrocer had the last laugh.
Historical figures like Birbal, the minister of Emperor Akbar and Tenali Rama, the jester in
the court of Krishnadevaraya (1509 AD - 1530 AD), ruler of the medieval Vijaynagar empire in
southern India are sources of great wit.



Once when Tenali Rama was sentenced to death for some trick or the other, he was given the
right to choose the form of his execution. After giving due consideration to the matter, he
says "Your Majesty! I would like to die of old age!" The emperor couldn’t bear being without
his wit and promptly pardoned him.

Source:

 Miriam Lichtheim (1914-2004). Ancient Egyptian Literature. Volume II: The New
Kingdom. The Regents of the University of California, 1976, 2006. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
 Greek Humour from Source: Philip Harland

Posted by Rana Sinha at 20:02

Mary Beard: humour in ancient Rome
was a matter of life and death
It has always been bad for your public image to laugh in the wrong
way or to crack jokes about the wrong targets, not least in the
presence of Caligula…
BY MARY BEARD

Titter ye may: Frankie Howerd as slave Lucio in Up Pompeii

One evening at a palace dinner party, in about 40AD, a couple of nervous aristocrats asked the emperor
Caligula why he was laughing so heartily. “Just at the thought that I’d only have to click my fingers and
I could have both your heads off!” It was, actually, a favourite gag of the emperor (he had been known to
come out with it when fondling the lovely white neck of his mistress). But it didn’t go down well.

Laughter and joking were just as high-stakes for ancient Roman emperors as they are for modern royalty
and politicians. It has always been bad for your public image to laugh in the wrong way or to crack jokes
about the wrong targets. The Duke of Edinburgh got into trouble with his (to say the least) ill-judged
“slitty-eyed” quip, just as Tony Abbott recently lost votes after being caught smirking about the
grandmother who said she made ends meet by working on a telephone sex line. For the Romans,
blindness – not to mention threats of murder – was a definite no-go area for joking, though they treated
baldness as fair game for a laugh (Julius Caesar was often ribbed by his rivals for trying to conceal his
bald patch by brushing his hair forward, or wearing a strategically placed laurel wreath). Politicians must
always manage their chuckles, chortles, grins and banter with care.
In Rome that entailed, for a start, being a sport when it came to taking a joke, especially from the plebs.
The first emperor, Augustus, even managed to stomach jokes about that touchiest of Roman topics, his
own paternity. Told that some young man from the provinces was in Rome who was his spitting image,
the emperor had him tracked down. “Tell me,” Augustus asked, “did your mother ever come to Rome?”
(Few members of the Roman elite would have batted an eyelid at the idea of some grand paterfamilias
impregnating a passing provincial woman.) “No,” retorted the guy, “but my father did, often.”

Where Caligula might have been tempted to click his fingers and order instant execution, Augustus just
laughed – to his lasting credit. The Romans were still telling this story of his admirable forbearance 400
years later. And, later still, Freud picked it up in his book on jokes, though attributing it now to some
German princeling. (It was, as Iris Murdoch puts into the mouth of one of her angst-ridden characters
in The Sea, The Sea, “Freud’s favourite joke”.)
It also entailed joining in the give-and-take with carefully contrived good humour and a man-of-the-
people air (I suspect Nigel Farage would have gone down horribly well in ancient Rome). The same
Augustus once went to visit his daughter and came across her being made up, her maids plucking out the
grey hairs one by one. Leaving them to it, he came back later and asked casually, “Julia, would you rather
be bald or grey?” “Grey, of course, Daddy.” “Then why try so hard to have your maids make you bald?”

Julia wasn’t usually quite such a pushover. She was one of the few Roman women celebrated for her own
quips (which were published after her death, risqué as some of them were). When asked how it was that
her children looked liked her husband when she was such a notorious adulteress, she equally notoriously
replied, “I’m a ship that only takes passengers when the hold is full”; in other words, risk adultery only
when you’re already pregnant.

Unlike Augustus, “bad” politicians repeatedly got the rules of Roman laughter wrong. They did not joke
along with their subjects or voters, but at their expense. The ultimate origin of the modern whoopee
cushion is, in fact, in the court of the 3rd-century emperor Elagabalus, a ruler who is said to have far
outstripped even Caligula in luxury and sadism. He would apparently make fun of his less important
dinner guests by sitting them on airbags, not cushions, and then his slaves would let out the air gradually,
so that by the middle of the meal they would find themselves literally under the table.

The worst imperial jokes were even nastier. In what looks like a ghastly parody of Augustus’s quip about
Julia’s grey hairs, the emperor Commodus (now best known as the lurid anti-hero, played by Joaquin
Phoenix, of the movie Gladiator) put a starling on the head of a man who had a few white hairs
among the black. The bird took the white hairs for worms, and so pecked them out. It looked like a good
joke, but it caused the man’s head to fester and killed him.

There were issues of control involved, too. One sure sign of a bad Roman ruler was that he tried to make
the spontaneous laughter of his people obey his own imperial whim. Caligula is supposed to have issued a
ban on laughter throughout the city after the death of his sister – along with a ban on bathing and family
meals (a significant trio of “natural” human activities that ought to have been immune to political
interference). But even more sinister was his insistence – the other way round – that people laugh against
their natural inclinations. One morning, for instance, he executed a young man and forced the father to
witness his son’s execution. That same afternoon he invited the
father to a party and now forced him to laugh and joke. Why did the man go along with it, people
wondered. The answer was simple: he had another son.
Self-control also came into the picture. The dear old emperor Claudius (who was also renowned for
cracking very feeble – in Latin, frigidus, “cold” – jokes) was a case in point. When he was giving the
first public reading from his newly composed history of Rome, the audience broke down at the beginning
of the performance because a very large man had caused several of the benches to collapse. The audience
members managed to pull themselves together but Claudius didn’t; and he couldn’t get through his
reading without cracking up all the time. It was taken as a sign of his incapacity.

Roman histories and biographies are full of cautionary tales about laughter, used and misused – told, for
the most part, to parade the virtues or vices of emperors and rulers. But just occasionally we get a glimpse
from the other side, of laughter from the crowd, from the underlings at court, or laughter used as a
weapon of opposition to political power. Romans did sometimes resort to scrawling jests about their
political leaders on their city walls. Much of their surviving graffiti, to be honest, concentrates on sex,
trivia (“I crapped well here”, as one slogan in Herculaneum reads) and the successes of celebrity
gladiators or actors. But one wag reacted to Nero’s vast new palace in the centre of Rome by scratching:
“Watch out, citizens, the city’s turning into a single house – run away to Veii [a nearby town], unless the
house gobbles up Veii, too.”

But the most vivid image of the other side of political laughter comes from the story told by a young
senator, Cassius Dio, of his own experiences at the Colosseum in 192AD. He’d nearly cracked up, he
explains, as he sat in the front row watching a series of gladiatorial games and wild beast hunts hosted by
the ruling emperor Commodus.

Commodus was well known for joining in these performances as an amateur fighter (that’s
where Gladiator gets it more or less right). During the shows in 192, he had been displaying his
“combat” skills against the wild beasts. On one day he had killed a hundred bears, hurling spears at them
from the balustrade around the arena. On other days, he had taken aim at animals safely restrained in nets.
But what nearly gave Dio the giggles was the emperor’s encounter with an ostrich.

After he had killed the poor bird, Commodus cut off its head, wandered over to where Dio and his friends
were sitting and waved it at them with one hand, brandishing his sword in the other. The message was
obvious: if you’re not careful, you’ll be next for the chop. The poor young senator didn’t know where to
put himself. It was, he claims, “laughter that took hold of us rather than distress” – but it would have been
a death sentence to let it show. So he plucked a leaf from the laurel wreath he was wearing and chewed on
it desperately to keep the giggles from breaking out.

It’s a nice story, partly because we can all recognise the sensation that Dio describes. His anecdote also
deals with laughter as a weapon against totalitarian regimes. Dio more or less boasts that he found the
emperor’s antics funny and that his own suppressed giggles were a sign of opposition. What better than to
say that the psychopathic tyrant was not scary but silly?

Yet it cannot have been quite so simple. For all Dio’s bravura looking back on the incident from the
safety of his own study, it is impossible not to suspect that sheer terror as much as ridicule lay behind that
laughter. Surely Dio’s line would have been rather different if some burly thug of an imperial guard had
challenged him on the spot to explain his quivering lips?

My guess is that those frightened aristocrats at the court of Caligula would have laughed in terror (or
politely) at the emperor’s murderous “joke”. But, back home safely, they would have told a bold and self-
congratulatory story, much as Dio did: “Of course, we couldn’t help but laugh at the silly man . . . !”
The truth is that, in politics as elsewhere, no one ever quite knows why anyone else is laughing – or
maybe not even why they themselves are laughing.

“Laughter in Ancient Rome” by Mary Beard is published by University of

California Press (£19.95)

Mary Beard with Deputy Director of The British Museum Andrew Burnett at a Roman Society event which took place at The
British Museum on June 3, 2010.

Mary Beard is a world-renowned classicist who teaches at Cambridge University, the writer of the eclectic blog A
Don's Life and the author of Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling and Cracking Up. She is also a
prominent feminist who does not back away from public battles.

"What I want to do is to to think a bit harder about how the Romans laughed and how we laugh. I think it goes
without saying that knowing how a culture laughs, when it laughs, and at what it laughs, helps us understand that
culture quite a lot better and I hope that I can convince you that that's true for Roman culture as well."

Mary Beard is Britain's most celebrated classicist. She appears regularly on television and radio, and
publishes widely in newspapers and magazines. She has a way of making the ancient world come alive.
Professor Beard teaches at the women-only Newnham College at Cambridge University.

In her blog - called A Don's Life- she writes passionately about everything from feminism to email etiquette to
political correctness.

She's been on a twitter campaign "against ageism and sexism to reclaim the word old as something that connotes
freedom and experience and not hunchback ladies with walking sticks.