‘Laughter has the power to make visible the very fact that people consistently think they see it all and have seen it all, even though they are always wrong. There is always something they cannot see, something they have not seen, and something more to be seen. This something more, however, is generally not something that the butt of a joke wants to see’ (p. 252). By inserting these disarming words into the final pages of a highly original and always super smart set of reflections on Plautus, G. is encapsulating the central insights that have grounded and driven his book over its course. By the time we arrive at this closing section, his critical sights have shifted from Plautus’ comic productions to Mervyn LeRoy's Gold Diggers of 1933 and Lu Ban's Unfinished Comedy, a pair of twentieth-century cinematic artefacts that, while thematically enabling some sharp comparatist observations about the never finished work of comedy and how its broken (like us) characters are always (still) engaged in the work of deciphering social (im)possibilities, serve structurally to close out the circle he had opened at take-off, some 200 pages earlier, with a disturbing reading of a disturbing film of Federico Fellini. I Clowns is ‘the best study of Plautus available’ (p. 4), provocatively states G., because it lays a finger squarely on comedy's unsignifiable kernel, the ‘something more’ inside clowning around that is dangerous and scary. It is the thing about comedy that makes people shriek and grimace and convulse, be it from laughter, from the desire to look like one of the smart people who get all the jokes, or, as in the case of Fellini's cinematic version of himself as a little boy, from painful aversion.

At the conceptual centre of G.’s readings of all twenty of the complete plays attributed to Plautus, then, lies the thing that Lacan and Žižek taught us to call ‘the thing’ (das Ding), that uncanny supplement, that Hegelian (one way to characterise G.’s project: putting the Hegel back in Plautus) moment of defining self-excess within any given item by virtue of which it is more than what it is. Überplautinisches im Plautus is a phrase G. (does not but) might have used to describe the quarry his Plautine investigations are tracking. And his interest in tragicomedy – a term that Plautus famously seems to have added to the world's lexicon in the Amphitruo prologue – signals no engagement with Hellenistic Kreuzung or genre theory at all, but rather a project of locating at the heart of Plautine comedy, indeed of comedy itself, an irony that is specifically tragicomic. A bidirectional product and producer of surplus meaning and enjoyment, tragicomic irony, as G. understands it, is what makes there be always a double meaning lying behind and beyond and inside whatever double meaning we audience members are currently revelling in. It is the thing about Plautine comedy thanks to which ‘we are always in on the joke and the joke is also on us’ (p. 217).

His focus on the Plautine ‘thing’, then, is what unifies and organises G.’s broad theoretical gestures – thought experiments like mounting a ‘Plautine Question’ thing along the lines of the Homeric Question, or the Borgesian time warp thing of reading the Plautine corpus as having the upending last word on all Latin literature by serving up a comedic commentary on it that ‘subverts the very possibility of seriousness for subsequent serious authors and their serious projects … seriously’ (p. 54) – as well as his readings of specific plays. In rounding out his first chapter with a quick pass through Lacan's ‘four discourses’, he is teaching us, for real, what kind of readers of Plautus he thinks we should be, in the face of the ‘scandalous’ (p. 10) and ‘inscrutable’ (p. 11) surplus that Plautine (tragi)comedy produces. The Master's discourse, powerful but unquestioning, won't do. Nor will the ‘knowledge-y’ (p. 19) but tautological (Plautus cracked this joke, you see, because Romans found this sort of thing funny) stance of the University Professor, nor will the broken but ever so special perspective of the Hysteric. Only the Analyst's discourse – the permutational turn that assigns the role of agency to the unspeakable thing itself and the output value of (another Hegelian word) ‘truth’ to the whole universe of signifiers – fills the bill, and it does this, G. seems to insist, with something like full adequacy.

Be assured (in case you were worried) that putting Plautus on the psychoanalyst's couch is far from G.’s intent. Rather, he seems at times to want to put us all – Plautus, himself and us readers – behind the couch, together in a happy puppy pile on the analyst's chair (almost like a professor and students all gathered around a seminar table, right?). Every perspective, and every smart one all the more, has its concomitant limitation, as G. well knows and acknowledges more than once. Call this very smart one's limitation an intermittent forgetfulness about how closely the version of analytic reading it touts – and enjoins upon us readers, under implicit pain of getting lumped together with some skanky strawmen – resembles an idealisation of being in the know and knowing better than. So one way to poke at this strong book's weak spot is to say that its readerly perspective might just turn out to be more knowledge-y, more professor-y and less analyst-y than advertised. Another way is to note something G. seems never to do, at least not explicitly, but that Lacan did frequently in regard to the analyst's relation to knowledge: namely to ironise it, by glossing the analyst as the ‘subject supposed’ (by the analysand) ‘to know’. Lacan knew that the only place where the analyst really knows is in the imaginary idealisation of the paying customer stretched out on the couch.

One's own cleverness is seductive like few other things, and cathexis with it tends to monkey-wrench the reading practices and critical perspectives that thrive on forms of unknowing like curiosity, wonder and open-minded scepticism. All the more unexpected, then, and frankly heartening, is the degree to which G.’s close readings of Plautus’ plays (yes, he does these) are animated not just by astute sharpness but by things like delicate psychological tact, magnanimous broadness of vision and sometimes the kinds of insight that only empathy affords. While every play gets at least a handful of mentions, the major studies are of Curculio, Pseudolus and Amphitruo. As impressive as are G.’s unpackings of the door scene in Curculio (door as elusive object of desire and imaginary mirror of a lover's own desire) and of the title character in Pseudolus as a kind of poet who shows up Roman cultural poetics as he fakes fakery, offers a slavish imitation of slavery and ‘identifies himself with our identificatory intellects’ (p. 161), his account of Amphitruo is to my mind the strongest piece of critical reading in the book, and an appreciation of Plautus’ comic and ethical art that is truly both fine and deep. He shows how Amphitruo's (and Alcumena's and even Sosia's) sufferings, all too human, are in their way tragic, yet our narcissistic identification with power – what makes us ‘side against ourselves’ (p. 225) – ironises their pain for us, makes the irony tragicomic, and makes human life tragicomically viewed ‘a nightmare that nevertheless seduces’ (p. 226). Getting to what this book has to say about the significance of Amphitruo and Plautine tragicomedy does require working through G.’s theoretical apparatus. It more than richly repays that labour and makes good on its promises. It makes this book an important and invigorating contribution.