isn’t It Funny?
Just over halfway up the Column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome is a memorable, and unsettling, scene. Although practically invisible from ground level, and almost crowded out by the images of violent conflict between Roman legions and German tribes which spiral up the shaft, it has often caught the attention of archaeologists. For it shows a young child being torn from the arms of his German mother by a Roman soldier—and still reaching out to her, as he is roughly hauled away.
Most commentators have interpreted this as a stark reminder of the horrors of warfare. The Column of Marcus, erected at the end of the second century AD, offers a much less civilized and genial picture of military combat than the more famous Column of Trajan of some seventy years earlier. Here we see bodies skewered, women abducted and dragged by their hair, native villages sacked and torched. The seizure of the helpless infant seems to sum up the grim message of the column as a whole.
It comes as a surprise, then, to discover that Eugen Petersen, director of the German Archae
ological Institute in Rome in the closing years of the nineteenth century and author of what remains even now the most meticulous publication on the column, took a very different view. He thought that this scene would have made the Romans laugh, and that it was in fact a joke (reaction in the shaftein Scherz). Though hardly a man renowned for his sense of humor, Petersen nevertheless saw here not the horror of abduction but fun and games, or light relief, among the battle lines.
Of course, we cannot now know how any Roman would have reacted to the scene, even supposing that they could clearly have made it out from the ground below. But either way, this is a classic example of the problem of studying laughter or humor—the two categories overlap but are not identical—in any historical period, and especially in one as far distant as ancient Rome. It is hard not to suspect that Petersen had fallen into the common trap of imposing his own eccentric idea of what might be funny or humorous on the visual images of the second century AD. Or alternatively he was using humor as a convenient explanation for something he found hard to understand. For like “religion” or “ritual,” “humor” has often proved a useful label to pin onto those objects or images from the ancient world which othe
rwise seem to defy explanation. If we cannot make sense of it, perhaps it was religious, or perhaps it was a joke. So the logic goes.
Laughter is one of the most treacherous of all fields of history. Like sex and eating, it is an absolutely universal human phenomenon, and at the same time something that is highly culturally and chronologically specific. Every human society in the world laughs, and whatever their race or language, people make almost exactly the same sound in doing so. Not only that, but they represent the sound of laughter in almost exactly the same alphabetic or phonetic form. Whereas Albanian dogs apparently go “ham ham” rather than “woof woof,” and Hungarian pigs go “rof rof rof,” not “oink oink,” there are few language communities in the world that do not represent the sound of laughter with some variant on “ha ha” or “hee hee.”
It even extends to primates. Charles Darwin was one of the first to recognize that Aristotle had been wrong to claim that human beings were the only animals to laugh. And since then many scholarly hours have been profitably spent tickling the underarms of chimps, and wat
ching them at play, to confirm that they do indeed laugh exactly like Homo sapiens. Or very nearly so. The sound of human laughter is made only as we exhale. Chimp laughter occurs also as they inhale. The difference may (or, of course, may not) be crucially significant.
Yet things look very different when we go beyond such physical stimuli to reflect on jokes, cartoons, pictures, and performances that provoke laughter. Never mind what we may share with the primates; it is often hard for the English to share a joke with their neighbors across the Channel, or to respond to cartoons penned a century ago. It is all very well for comedians to claim that “the old ones are the best,” but anyone who has picked up a nineteenth-century copy of a comic magazine such as Punch is almost bound to have been disappointed. Even when they are not referring to the minutiae of some now forgotten political crisis, the vast majority of the cartoons simply don’t make you laugh. It is sometimes easy enough, on a few moments’ reflection, to get the joke and to see why it might once have seemed funny; but that is a very long way from feeling the remotest temptation to laugh oneself. In that sense laughter does not travel across space, time, or even necessarily—as any encounter with a group of under-fifteens will tell us—between diff
erent age groups in a single community.
So how do we reconcile these two sides of laughter—the biological universal and the intensely culturally specific? Theorists and scientists have worked on the problem from both ends. On the one hand, they have shown that laughter from tickling is not quite the reflex response we often assume it to be. For a start, it is next to impossible to raise a laugh by tickling yourself (whereas you can easily make your own leg jerk by striking your patella with a hammer). It is also the case that when tickling happens in threatening rather than friendly circumstances, it doesn’t produce laughter, but screams or tears. Hence the conclusion that—while there may be some purely biological prompts to laughter (though not the misnamed “laughing gas,” which only produces euphoria)—the link between tickling and laughing is largely a social one, not a reflex at all. From this stems a range of theories that go on to explain laughter as the result of evolutionary adaptation within early society. One idea is that laughing functioned as a “false alarm” device. It was a sign to primitive hominids that despite all the rumpus that other hominids were creating, this was no enemy attack but friendly knockabout.

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