Book Alert / Looking At Laughter

Looking At Laughter -- Humor, Power and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture, 100 B.C. -- A.D. 250 by John R. Clarke, UCal Press '07, 309 pages, ISBN #0520237331. Index, illustrations, bibliography, source notes, grouping of full-color glossy images, b&w images sprinkled through text.

"What made Romans laugh?" the author asks. Based on all the sobersides antiquarian statuary most of us have seen over the years, our answer might be "obviously, nothing." Not so, says University of Texas art historian John R. Clarke.

In his scholarly approach to what passed for humor way back when, Clarke divides his study into three parts: "Visual Humor," "Social Humor," and "Sexual Humor." To get at the essence of Roman laughter, one has to cut through layers of a cultural surround, so don't expect "A man walks into a bar," knee-slapping routines.

While Clarke has dredged up "positive images of sexual intercourse between ideal couples," he also surveys all manner of perversion as well. And the context is often revealing of what it was like to live in the Rome of antiquity:

"In positive, nonhumorous sexual images the penetrator is always an adult man, reflecting the most important rule in Roman sex: the elite man can, without stigma or punishment, insert his penis into any orifice of the body of another, as long as that other person is of inferior status. Artists emphasize the woman's eagerness to be penetrated by the man, and in male-male sex scenes they point up the difference in age between the two so that a Roman viewer immediately understands that the penetrated partner is a boy of inferior social status -- slave, freedman, or foreigner -- and therefore fair game.'