The Laughter-Lover…
“The most wasted day is that in which we have not laughed.”
What would we do without humor? How would we enjoy talks with others if we did not use humor to invite a smile or a laugh? And how would we manage the times when we feel sad and alone?
With humor we lighten up each day, and we find common ground with others. We build healthy relationships with others by knowing what to say and to do that helps, and what hinders, a conversation. Humor often takes us to the edge of uncertainty when we exaggerate, or tease others to make our point. When humor is successful, we build trust and cooperation. We discover that we are not alone, we learn to accept our mistakes, and we look for the good in others and in our selves. Most important, we create common ground.
The one side of laughter is its biological universality. The human being is, almost by definition, the only animal in the world to laugh. That, at least, is what many people have insisted from antiquity on, while prompting at the same time all kinds of counter,claims that other species share our expression of mirth. Another theory, which goes back in some form to ancient Greek philosophy, argues that all laughter is an expression of superiority: it is, in other words, always an aggressive response, a form of derision or mockery (laughing at, rather than with).
The “Laughter-Lover” or Philogelos (Φιλόγελως) is the oldest surviving book with jokes, a collection of wisecracks probably compiled in the fourth or fifth century AD. Containing some 260 short gags, written in Greek, it has come down to us in various, slightly different versions, The authorship of the collection is uncertain and it has been attributed to a variety of different people. The most complete surviving manuscript of it credits two authors named “Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos.” Grammatikos could mean “scribe” or possibly “grammarian,” but the grammar of the Philogelos is generally poor, which seems to rule out any possibility that it was written by a trained scribe.
The book s arranged broadly according to the subject matter of the jokes. Most of those in the first half of the book, have as their theme (and victim) a character called in Greek a “scholastikos", sometimes translated as an "egghead" or "absent-minded professor". The scholastikos is so clever that he's stupid, and regularly uses his (ostensibly) highly trained brain to come to precisely the wrong conclusion. The second part of the book features a range of other comic-type characters: from crooked fortune tellers and cowardly boxers to sharp-talkers, men with bad breath and a predictable target in this decidedly misogynistic culture "oversexed women”.
By far the largest category after the scholastikos, though, are jokes at the expense of particular nationalities, and they bear more than a passing resemblance to "Irish" jokes, or "Belgian" jokes as told in France. Some of the main victims are the people from the city of Abdera, in what is now northern Greece. Why they, above others, should have been targeted for the ancient equivalent of the "how many Irishmen does it take to change a lightbulb" treatment, we haven't a clue.
And some of the jokes in Philogelos are…
An intellectual, falling sick, had promised to pay the doctor if he recovered. When his wife nagged at him for drinking wine while he had a fever, he said: "Do you want me to get healthy and be forced to pay the doctor?"
When an intellectual was told by someone, "Your beard is now coming in," he went to the rear-entrance and waited for it. Another intellectual asked what he was doing. Once he heard the whole story, he said: "I'm not surprised that people say we lack common sense. How do you know that it's not coming in by the other gate?"
A young man said to his libido-driven wife: "What should we do, darling? Eat or have sex?" And she replied: "You can choose. But there's not a crumb in the house."
While a misogynist was paying his last respects to his wife, someone asked him: "Who has gone to rest?" He replied: "Me, now that I'm alone.”
A man complains that the slave he has recently purchased has died. "By the gods", says the slave's former owner, "when he was with me, he never did any such thing."
A student dunce wants to see if he looks good when he's asleep. So he stands in front of a mirror with his eyes closed.
A misogynist was sick, at death's door. When his wife said to him, "If anything bad happens to you, I’ll hang myself," he looked up at her and said: "Do me the favor while I'm still alive."