Latin is rich in words for jokes or witticisms, but poor in words for different kinds of laughter. Two of B.'s most striking claims in this wide-ranging and thoughtful book, based on her Sather lectures delivered at Berkeley in 2008, are that the Romans invented the joke and that they did not smile. I am exaggerating about the smile (‘by and large, in our terms, no’ is how she puts it, p. 74) and B. acknowledges that she herself is exaggerating about the joke, but her arguments about these two important concepts have much to tell us about what it means for laughter to have a history. Because laughter is a universal human experience with a physiological manifestation we tend to think of the culture of laughter as a constant. But humour and laughter raise some of the most difficult questions about understanding other cultures and historical periods. Can we be so sure that a certain Latin word (renidere, for instance) means the same as our ‘smile’, or that a certain facial expression in ancient art depicts a smile? As for the invention of the joke, to what extent is a joke not just a form of words but a token in a culture of jokes, commodified, collected and swapped?

Whether or not we are convinced that the Romans did not smile, B. makes us think twice about what it would mean to have an opinion on the subject, and brings home just how central smiling is to our own ‘laughterhood’ (B.'s term). As she points out, smiling is one of the most important signifying gestures in the modern world, and the concept bundles together ‘warmth, greeting, wry amusement, disdain, affection, confidence, ambivalence, and much more’ (p. 75). There is no equivalent word in Latin, but we assume that the Romans must have been much like us and find smiles all over the place. Renidere is often more appropriately translated as ‘beam’ than ‘smile’, and to translate ridere as ‘smile’ where we would feel that a smile is in order is to beg the question. I have always thought that when Tacitus admired the Germans for the fact that, by contrast with the Romans, nemo vitia ridet (Germania 19), he meant ‘no one smiles at vice’, but now I am not so sure (the mysterious remark is discussed by B. on p. 52). If smiles were not as significant for Roman laughterhood as they are for ours, salt was much more significant. There is no Greek equivalent of the idea of wit as salt. What should we make of that? For one thing, the culinary connections might reflect the importance of the convivium for the Roman culture of laughter (think of Catullus c. 13).

B. divides her study of Roman laughter into two parts. The first concerns itself with concepts, definitions, theories and terminology, and it is here that she engages directly with the conceptual problems surrounding history, laughter and humour, including substantive discussions of theories of laughter, modern and ancient (there was no one ancient theory of humour, as she emphasises). In the second part she identifies some key themes and areas of particular interest in the Roman culture of laughter in four chapters, ‘The Orator’, ‘From Emperor to Jester’, ‘Between Animal and Human – Especially Monkeys and Asses’ and ‘The Laughter Lover’ (on the Philogelos collection). Throughout she is characteristically sceptical of overarching theories, and cautious about what we can confidently know.

There are, of course, many kinds of question one might ask about Roman laughter. The extent to which we can map their concepts and words onto ours, or those of the Greeks, is only one way to approach the topic. B. discusses institutions or occasions where laughter was important (Saturnalia, mime, etc.), as well as particular figures connected with laughter in some way, positive or negative (scurra, parasitus, agelast). She investigates what made Romans laugh (monkeys, among other things). More broadly, she points out that Roman laughter has its own issues and controversies, not only about what is appropriate or inappropriate laughter, but also about how to separate causing laughter from being its butt (ridiculus in its two senses). The latter question is particularly helpful in understanding the categories of the scurra and the parasitus. She also considers the agenda of Roman laughter, in other words, the concerns that are revealed as particularly acute for Roman culture by what the Romans laughed about (power and identity are two of her suggestions).

B. is as resistant to a single theory of laughter as she is to a single approach to the topic. The social function of laughter at Rome has been the focus of much attention recently, and scholarship on this issue has been monochrome in its emphasis on aggression and social control. B.'s discussion of the role of laughter in Roman rhetorical treatises and oratory refreshingly widens the scope of humour's uses. She argues, among other things, that Cicero's jesting invective (like Catullus’, one could add) ‘might also have been an interactive idiom shared between the orator and its apparent victim’ (p. 123). But power, that obsession of the contemporary humanities, is not neglected. Laughter is often described as the most effective weapon against the powerful, and B.'s chapter ‘From Emperor to Jester’ addresses the ways in which laughter functions to distinguish between good and bad emperors: tolerating jokes about himself from his subjects was one of the marks of an emperor's civilitas. This was not a virtue cultivated by Commodus, and the book opens with an extended discussion of Cassius Dio's description of his attempts to stifle laughter when Commodus waved at the senate the head of an ostrich he had just dispatched in the arena. Dio ran the risk of ‘corpsing’ in a very material sense.

There will be much to discuss in this book, which opens up a new and exciting field of research. Every reader will find points of disagreement, as well as enlightenment. I am not convinced by B.'s claim that Roman jokes, especially those in the Philogelos, reflect a concern with identity (‘Was it you or your brother who died?’ asks a scholastikos). This seems as unhelpful as saying that all laughter is about power, which B. rightly dismisses with the words ‘true, but what cultural form isn't?’ (p. x). More helpful is her use of Simon Critchley's theory that comedians are like anthropologists, who draw our attention to ‘the misrepresentations, shortcuts and occlusions that common sense rests on’ (p. 197). There are, inevitably, also topics one would have liked to see B. tackle. I missed a discussion of Juvenal's statement that poverty has nothing worse than that it makes people laughable (ridiculos 3.152–3). Along with monkeys, one might include poverty as another thing that made Romans laugh, and that is surely a significant fact about the laughterhood of Rome.

This is an important book, and it will have us thinking harder not only about Roman laughter but also about historical understanding itself.