‘Omnishambles’; ‘gruntled’; ‘hoopy frood’. The history of comedy is replete with linguistic ingenuity, of which this trio barely scratches the surface. Comedy’s play of language, as Apostolakis and Konstantakos put it, can even spill out from comedy into the real world. ‘Omnishambles’ for example, originating in 2009 in the TV series The Thick of It, made it to the Oxford English Dictionary’s ‘Word of the Year’ in 2012. The current volume, however, is no omnishambles but rather a valuable collection of revealing chapters illuminating Greek comedy’s linguistic variety and ingenuity.
One challenge that academic studies of comedy face is that what makes a particular joke funny often feels intuitive to us. Explaining humour is a more complex task than it might at first appear, and in recent years we have seen several works that have made headway in illuminating our understanding of ancient humour (such as E. Hall and P. Swallow [edd.], Aristophanic Humour [2020]; N. Scott, Jokes in Greek Comedy [2023]). What makes this collection stand out is the breadth of the material covered, including several areas that can easily be overlooked in discussions of linguistic humour. Some topics covered expand on more well-covered ground, such as the contributions of B. Zimmermann on metaphors and personifications or S.D. Olson’s chapter on obscenity, while other chapters are notable for their focus on areas not well covered in existing scholarship, such as A. Willi’s chapter focusing on παρ᾽ ὑπόνοιαν jokes or D. Kanellakis’s work on rhyme. Another important facet of the book is that it avoids a narrow focus on the fifth century bce, including chapters covering middle and new comedy (A. Novokhatko, Apostolakis and A. Petrides). Overall, the volume is a welcome addition to the literature for those interested in the techniques used in Greek comedy to generate humour.
The introduction is extensive and provides a useful survey of previous scholarship that has shaped the field. Konstantakos notes that this is a survey of the works he has found most influential, although he nonetheless offers an impressive scope in the range of scholarship discussed. As a result, the introduction is a great resource for anyone (such as postgraduate students) who want to get a good sense of the field and its history. Of course, it is worth bearing in mind that there are gaps in any survey of this kind, and I will not bore readers by trying (and inevitably failing) to fill in all the omissions.
The introduction also makes a case for the centrality of language to the analysis of Greek comedy. While not denying the importance of performance criticism, Konstantakos argues that ‘comedy, as an art form, is not only a performative event’ (p. 1). It was also highly literary and linguistically sophisticated; he suggests that ‘Greek comedy was, first and foremost, a theatre of language, a drama of words’ (pp. 1–2). There is a danger, however, of the approach being too binary: text vs performance. In fact, this drawback is noted in the introduction, where Konstantakos comments that ‘a fascinating line of investigation, which has not been pursued as much as it would deserve, is the interaction of language and performance, especially the connection between particular forms of style and the delivery of the text by the actors’ (p. 37). This is a significant point since performance can render the simplest words or phrases hilarious: think of Rowan Atkinson’s ‘Bob’ or Matt Berry’s ‘New York City’. Admittedly, given the state of our evidence for acting in the ancient world, understanding the interaction between text and performance in relation to humour is no easy feat, but this is surely an integral aspect of ancient comedy that should be pursued further.
My main critique of the volume is that several chapters would have benefited from a greater engagement with the field of humour studies. Despite being a broad and interdisciplinary area of study, the field of linguistics has been especially influential on the development of humour theories ever since the development of the General Theory of Verbal Humour by S. Attardo and V. Raskin in the 1980s and 90s (although many significant developments have been made since). As a result, there is a plethora of scholarship on the linguistics of humour (such as by D. Chiaro, V. Tsakona, C. Hempelmann and others). While the absence of engagement with these works does not create argumentative flaws in the chapters, the lack of engagement with a major field of study adjacent to the topic of the volume is surprising, since in several cases a more interdisciplinary approach could have provided valuable insights.
To demonstrate some ways that humour studies could enhance the ideas here, and to gesture towards how other scholars might be able to take the chapters further, let me provide a couple of short examples. In Willi’s chapter on παρ᾽ ὑπόνοιαν jokes in the Aristophanic scholia we find an illuminating discussion of the extent to which ancient scholiasts understood or could explain the jokes in Aristophanes’ plays. The category under consideration is especially significant, given its proximity to modern incongruity theories of humour, in which expectation and surprise form key elements. At the same time it is clear that we cannot talk of a single, coherent incongruity theory; the term has been evoked in numerous ways in multiple time periods and contexts (e.g. the overview by G. Ritchie, Comprehension of Jokes [2018]). In his elucidation of significant terms in the scholia, it would have been welcome and helpful to explore how the scholia might shed light on the unique ways in which comedians were imagined as manipulating expectation. Even if, as Willi suggests, παρ᾽ ὑπόνοιαν explanations are not used especially critically, the scholiasts’ comments nevertheless could provide useful inroads for a better understanding of humour in the ancient world.
Meanwhile, Olson’s chapter on figurative obscenities not only updates and challenges some of the readings and assumptions of J. Henderson’s Maculate Muse (1975), but also poses some wider methodological questions about how we read figurative language in Greek comedy: can we be certain that particular words were used with a double meaning? When is a cigar just a cigar? At times, for Olson funniness appears to be one potential criterion for judging these questions, since in certain entries the metaphorical meaning is said to make the passage in question ‘neither funnier nor clearer’ (e.g. §§ 16, 20, 23 with note 20). As Olson notes, however, invoking funniness as a criterion risks argumentative circularity (p. 129). What we would need to bolster the strength of the analysis in many of these cases would be a clearer and more rigorous framework for the interpretation of humour. Of course, theories of humour should not be confused with objective measures: as Olson observes, ‘analysing humour routinely tells us at least as much about what we find amusing as about what our sources did’ (p. 159). While the chapter does not take the additional step of considering how useful modern theoretical frameworks might be, it helpfully encourages readers to be self-critical in the approach to ancient obscenity and leaves the door open for more developments in future.
A significant exception is Petrides’s chapter on Menandrian humour, which draws on S. Attardo’s work on humour as breaking P. Grice’s ‘co-operative principle’ as well as taking useful lessons from work on conversational humour and teasing. In so doing Petrides uses the example of the Dyscolus to illuminate how Menander uses verbal humour naturalistically as a way to characterise figures and to explore the relationship between this verbal humour and the wider themes of his plays. Given the relative dearth of scholarship on humour in Menander and later Greek comedy more generally, this chapter is a welcome addition that illustrates how interdisciplinary approaches can shed valuable new light on the ancient texts. These examples, I hope, showcase both the many strengths of all these chapters as well as suggesting paths forward.
For this reviewer, this book is welcome for two reasons: on the one hand, the chapters all contribute towards a better understanding of the use of humour in Greek comedy, an area which is (to me) overlooked or taken for granted too often; on the other, the volume gestures towards the extent of the work still required. I can only hope that it inspires others to take the topic of linguistic humour (and humour more generally) further in the future.
