Laughter, Humor, and Comedy in Ancient Philosophy by Pierre Destrée And Franco V. Trivigno

Author:Pierre Destrée And Franco V. Trivigno
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

Laughter and the Moral Guide

Dio Chrysostom and Plutarch

Michael Trapp

The phrase “a barrel of laughs” is not one you would immediately associate either with Dio Chrysostom or with Plutarch. Plutarch is famously on record as strongly preferring Menander to Aristophanes, and indeed citing a line of Aristophanes on hearty laughter as an example of the kind of “nauseating tripe” he found in him.1 Dio, perhaps not quite so famously, is quoted as asserting that a human face is less well graced by laughter than by tears.2 Yet there is in fact a lot of laughter in both of these authors. And it is not so very difficult to see why this should be, given the deep and consistent interest both profess in the moral health and moral progress of their fellow men. Because laughter matters morally: how one laughs, with whom one laughs, at whom one laughs, and how one reacts to being laughed with or at are important indicators of moral condition,3 and laughter itself—properly understood and properly controlled (whatever we may think of the criteria of propriety being employed)—can be seen by the moral teacher and guide not only as a useful diagnostic tool but also as a strikingly effective therapeutic resource. By the same token, the moralist’s commentary on laughter and sense of its proper deployment clarifies his own standpoint as teacher.

So much in broad outline is obvious enough; the subtlety and the interest is in the detail. Much of what I shall have to say about both authors should be read as a set of footnotes to Stephen Halliwell’s excellent analysis of the ethics of Greek philosophical hilarity in chapters 6 and 7 of Greek Laughter, though I do also take myself to be directing attention to a region of this landscape that, though relatively marginal to his concerns, was a well-populated and influential one in the first few centuries ce. I shall begin, then, with Dio.

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