ABSTRACT
The existence of humour in Byzantium still appears surprising to the modern scholarly mind. Humour – a phenomenon which can include a variety of behaviour intended to produce smiles or laughter in an audience or readership – is the ultimate unorthodoxy, with its implications of mockery, lack of respect or restraint, reversal of roles, and evasion of social and/or political control. This is especially the case as so much Byzantine humour, like its classical predecessors, was based on mockery, abuse and humiliation – subjects like defecation, obscenity, physical violence, ritual humiliation, insults, and heavy sexual innuendo are rampant in the twelfth century, if not earlier (Garland 1990b, 1999b; Haldon 2002a, 2002b). To the Byzantines themselves, laughter was generally considered not only vulgar, but licentious and impious: just as Jesus, in the Gospel tradition, is never recorded as indulging in laughter, so saints, for example, are rarely if ever described as laughing – though they occasionally indulge in a smile which characterises their apatheia, their lack of concern with humanity’s passions and desires. George of Amastris (d. 807), Loukas the Younger of Stiris (d. 953), and Paul of Latros (d. 955) abhorred jokes and laughter as children; Nikon ‘ho Metanoeite’ (d. 1000) checks all uncontrolled laughter in bystanders; and the Life of Theodore of Edessa (d. 856) categorises laughter and jests amongst sins to be avoided by a holy man. 1 Similarly the Greek 164fathers, particularly Basil of Caesarea and John Chrysostom, condemned laughter (Adkin 1985), and from the time of Basil monks were specifically cautioned against the sin of laughing as a deliberate evasion of monastic gravitas. 2 In addition, where humorous incidents are recorded by historians or epistolographers, the narrative is invariably intended to point out the moral or political unsoundness of the participants and/or victim(s).
