Christopher Hart
Laugh? I Nearly Died
Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling and Cracking Up
By Mary Beard
University of California Press 319pp £19.95 order from our bookshop
‘Astudent goes into his grandmother’s bedroom and starts humping her. When his father comes in to give him a good clout for being so disgusting, the son says, “Well, you hump my mother, why can’t I hump yours?”’
I’ve adapted this old Roman joke into modern vernacular, but still, I confess, I find it so obscene and bizarre it makes me laugh like a drain. It’s worthy of Bernard Manning. Not all Roman jokes are so funny, and we have a whole collection of them preserved in the text called Philogelos (‘The Laughter Lover’). An awful lot of them are grim – ‘How does a man with bad breath commit suicide? Puts a bag over his head and asphyxiates himself!’ – and a lot more are only slightly funny after long and solemn academic exegeses.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Unlike much that was extracted from India, these paintings were not plunder, and those who created them were properly remunerated and often received due credit.'
@PParkerWriting on 'Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/artists-for-hire
‘"I feel", Lowell told Hardwick ... "as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision."'
Richard Davenport-Hines on the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/yours-unfaithfully-2
'To me, Elmore Leonard is as comforting in extremity as Pym, and as safe, in the last resort, as Wodehouse. The guys with the best lines are going to come out the other side; the dumb fucks are going to get it in the head or chest.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-spoonful-of-elmore