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- [00:00]
A
The ancient Romans make great modern comedy.
- [00:04]
B
There's Up Pompeii, there's Asterix, there's Life of Brian. What did the Romans Ever do for Us? Which might be a kind of tagline for this podcast, frankly. I've got one for you, Mary. Actually, since today's subject is Roman jokes, a time traveller goes back to ancient Rome and realizes that he hasn't got anything to wear. So he's a larger gentleman. He goes into a toga shop and he asks the assistant, do you have XL togas? And the assistant says, yes, but what do you need 40 of them for? It's a Roman numerals gag.
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A
Oh, blimey. I hope you haven't got any more like that, Charlotte. But our question is, what made the ancient Romans themselves laugh? What were their gags or their sense of humour? What did the Romans laugh at?
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B
The fact is that whenever a civilization declines, falls, disappears, the humor often goes with it. And I would say more than that, actually, Mary. Humour is so culturally specific. You know, we often don't find what people laughed at 50 years ago funny. How on earth can we kind of recapture what the. What the Romans found funny? But, you know, I think, don't you, Mary, because you've literally written the book
- [01:34]
A
on this, I spent a long time thinking about what Romans laughed at. And in this episode, we're going to be digging into that a bit, into Roman humor, trying to think about how different it was from our own. But more than that, what can Roman humor tell us about the world of ancient Rome itself? So this is Instant Classics, the podcast that uncovers the ancient stories still shaping our world today. I'm Mary Beard.
- [02:11]
B
And I'm Charlotte Higgins. Each week we dive into the myths, the dramas and the characters of the classical world to discover what they still mean to us.
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A
Now this episode, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Or did it?
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C
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Refreshers contain caffeine Copyright 2026 the Coca Cola Company.
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Sprite is a registered trademark of the Coca Cola Company.
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B
So, Mary, I'm afraid, you know, I'm going to start with a really fundamental question for you. Are there. Be honest, are there actually any Roman jokes? And when. I mean Roman Jokes. I mean, jokes made by ancient Romans as opposed to silly jokes made by us today about the Romans. Are there any Roman jokes that you think I'll laugh out loud funny?
- [03:29]
A
There are a few. There are a few. I'm actually going to keep my very favourite under wraps for a bit, but here's a quickie, right? It's about a guy walking along the street, meets a friend of his. They say, hi. Then the first guy says, but somebody told me you were dead. The other guy replies, you can see that I'm not dead. You know, here I am, you know, I've just said hello. First guy says, but the man who told me you were dead is much more reliable than you are. Now, look, I have delivered that to an audience and I've honed my way of telling it so that I can actually raise a laugh out of it.
- [04:17]
B
It is funny. It takes a little bit of thinking through. I would say you have to get
- [04:24]
A
into the Roman groove. But I think it is, you know, it is perhaps my second favorite.
- [04:29]
B
Okay, well, I think you probably also, to be fair, you need a better audience than just me. It's not quite, quite the Comedy Store, is it? No.
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A
I've had some coaching from professional comedians and I now do it better than I used to.
- [04:46]
B
Oh, that's interesting.
- [04:48]
A
But what about you? Come on, Charlotte, is there anything that makes you laugh out loud or, let's just say, kind of grin, curl up your lips?
- [05:01]
B
It's not. I had to think about this. It's not, it's not. I don't find myself kind of laughing in the aisles about Roman literature, Right. But there are some really memorable sayings or gags that I think are kind of witty. Definitely, definitely witty. So, you know, the way that Roman emperors became gods after their death. There's a story told of the Emperor Vespasian by the biographer, his biographer Suetonius, and his dying words were supposed to be, oh, goodness, I think I'm becoming a God. Well, you laugh.
- [05:40]
A
I think that's quite funny. But it's, I think more important, though, is it's kind of, it's. It's plugging us into that sense that if you want to be a good Roman emperor, you have to have, you know, in the. A gsoh, a good sense of humor. You're supposed to be one of the lads. You're not supposed to take yourself too seriously, and that borders onto having a joke at your own expense. And that's what Vespasian was very good at. He had another, Another nice one along those Same lines was when he was celebrating a triumphal procession and he had to go through the whole of the city of Rome in, in an unsprung chariot. And he had elderly knees. And when he gets out of the chariot, the end of his triumphal procession, he says, well, that'll teach me to want a triumph at my old age.
- [06:38]
B
Right.
- [06:39]
A
It's kind of down to earthness.
- [06:43]
B
Yeah, Maybe his sense of humor was nicer or more benign than some imperial sense of humor. Because there are stories told about jokes or gags or witticisms or practical jokes actually that Roman emperors do or make. And they're often a bit double edged, aren't they? Like they're sort of slightly about humiliating your guests. So there's this story about Augustus who giving presents to all his guests. But some of them would be incredibly precious and valuable and expensive and some of them would be absolutely worthless. And there's a kind of sense of I have the power here. It's really ha ha funny and you're all supposed to laugh at this, but actually it's showing my power and that you can't really complain about this. And it slightly reminded me of there's a moment in Prince Harry's autobiography, Spare, in which he describes his Aunt Margaret, Princess Margaret, giving him a biro for Christmas. And it's like, it's funny, but it's kind of cruel. You know, it's kind of weird, but it's a little bit like that. And like Emperor Augustus was supposed to have all these fun, witty sayings, wasn't he? Like if something happened very fast, he would say it's as quick as boiled asparagus. Which again, you're laughing. Mary, you're a sucker for Roman humor. For me, it's Brian Blessed saying that in the BBC adaptation of I, Claudius,
- [08:07]
A
is there anyone in Rome who has not slept with my daughter?
- [08:11]
B
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's another double edged witticism, isn't it?
- [08:15]
A
Yeah, but that's the modern one. You know, Augustus never really said that.
- [08:18]
B
Right.
- [08:19]
A
I've been trying to think about though kind of literary works that are funny because, you know, if I'm going to be completely honest, and I watch Roman comedy and there are plenty of Roman comedies, kind of boy gets girl, clever slave manages to outwit stupid master, et cetera, et cetera. A bit like up Pompeii, actually, I have to say that I can sit through a Roman comedy stony faced throughout. And so, I mean, I do have to ask myself kind of what is there anything which beyond the one liner, I think is funny. And there is only one, one work of Roman literature that makes me begin to laugh out loud. And it's a work which one of our listeners, Peyton from Arkansas, suggested we talk about. What it is, is it's the impossibly named apocalokyntosis. That means, probably means the pumpkinification written by the philosopher Seneca, which is a prolonged skit back to Roman emperors becoming gods. It's a prolonged skit on the Emperor Claudius becoming a God. And there is a kind of comic momentum in this because there's Claudius, he's a bit doddery, he's just died and he's got to struggle all the way up Olympus to kind of find out if the gods are going to let him become one of them. He has some funny encounters on the way. He meets Hercules, who he thinks is very learned because Hercules is talking Greek. He gets up to the divine senate are on Mount Olympus, and they decide when they take a look at him, no, thank you very much. And so it's a kind of political satire. And of course it, I suppose it appeals to us because we think that the whole practice of Roman emperors being made into gods at their death is slightly funny. And there's a sort of relief, actually to discover that some Romans thought it was slightly funny too. So I think if somebody wanted a funny work of Roman literature, I would go there. It's called the apocalyptosis and we'll put it in the show notes because it's an impossible word.
- [11:08]
B
Pumpkinification is also verging on the impossible. But anyway, other things that are for you, kind of so unfunny that the Romans laughed at, that are completely inexplicable,
- [11:22]
A
some of them are. I wouldn't want to kind of exaggerate too much about the inexplicability of it, because there are some things that you can see the joke even if you don't actually find it funny yourself. And there's a wonderful set of images from a bar in the Roman port of Ostia, actually, which displays a load of famous philosophers, but actually they're all sitting on the loo and out of their mouths are coming good advice about how to have an effective bowel movement. Now you sort of see what's going on, even if you think, blimey. But when you get to the extremes, I mean, there are things that are just baffling. I mean, there's two, not just one, but two famous philosophers were supposed literally to have died laughing. Because that is actually a, you know, a Roman cliche. Just as it is. Just as it is ours, you know, he died laughing. What did they die laughing at? Well, they died laughing at. At a donkey who was eating figs.
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B
Didn't donkeys eat figs all the time? I mean, donkeys, orchards, fig trees. This is all very Mediterranean.
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A
One of these philosophers was renowned never to have laughed before. The one thing that finally made him crack up was a donkey eating figs. And it does look as if there is something hugely hilarious for a Roman audience about an animal eating food that you think was intended for humans.
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B
Right, okay.
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A
But there's another one. I mean, it's kind of a misogynistic one, really. It's told of the famous Greek. Actually Greek painter Zeuxis. He also died of laughter. He's another one of laughter's casualties. What was he laughing at? He was laughing at the painting of an old woman that he painted himself. Okay, I just haven't got it.
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B
But like I say, I mean, there are lots of things, you know, you wouldn't have to. It's not just that we don't find funny what people found funny 50 years ago. I mean, often for us, that's because the limits of acceptability in terms of political correctness or whatever have changed. Right. You know, we don't think it's okay to make funny jokes about people who look a little bit unlike the person making the jokes. Old ladies, racist jokes are no longer funny is what I'm trying to say. So I guess we shouldn't be surprised that these are irrecoverable to us.
- [14:11]
A
We've also got to reckon that every culture has failed jokes and bad jokes, and a few, you know, there's plenty of jokes, modern jokes that we can see were intended to be funny, but that don't make us laugh. It's not that every modern joke is guaranteed to have us chortling, but I think it goes further in ancient Rome, and they're picking up from ancient Greek theories because they have the most extraordinary to us, most extraordinary theories about laughter. It's not just what jokes make you laugh, but what laughter is. And now, actually, we have some pretty extraordinary theories about laughter. I mean, you know, laughter is something which human beings are supposed universally to share, but what causes it in the brain is always puzzling, contested, and sometimes quite fantastic. In some ways, the Romans were a bit. A bit more down to earth than our neurological theorists because they thought laughter actually came from the diaphragm. It came from irritating the diaphragm, which, of course is why Tickling someone under the armpits. In the armpits? Why that works to produce laughter because you're getting pretty close to the diaphragm.
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B
I like.
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A
Doesn't, however, fit with another theory they have when they ask themselves, so which is the most ticklish part of the body? You know, the part of the body that would most be like to get somebody to laugh if you gave it a bit of a tickle. Now, if you ask me that, I'm going to say, well, what would you say?
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B
For me, it would be under the arm or soles of the feet?
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A
Yeah, for me, it's soles of the feet. I mean, not a, you know, not a shadow of doubt. There's one Roman writer who says, it's your lips. Now, when I first read that, I thought, that's. That's crazy. You know, had they not thought about the soles of the feet, perhaps the soles of their feet. Perhaps they went barefoot more often, so they kind of toughened up a bit. How could you possibly think that it was the lips? What I then did. I mean, I started to try a few intimate experiments here on tickling people's lips. What the eye opener was that it worked a treat. That if you get yourself into the mindset of thinking that the lips are going to cause you to laugh. They do.
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B
Gosh, how weird. And I guess, of course, they're incredibly sensitive, the lips, because they're made for kissing and all of that.
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A
Yeah, yeah. And if you kind of just rush your little kind of tips of your fingers on them, you'll see what the Romans thought. Oh, it just really. It really works. And so this was here.
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B
That's so true.
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A
It is, isn't it? It really is.
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B
It really is. That's insane. I mean, of course it makes sense. Of course that needs to be a very sensitive part of the body for all kinds of reasons. Kissing and non kissing, eating and pleasure of all kinds.
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A
Whoa. It really was an eye opener for me. Not that I've kind of put it into practice much since, but I can see how it was.
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B
Careful of Mary Beard, she'll come around and tickle you on the lip.
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A
I think the other thing that I found when I was working on Roman laughter that I found quite surprising was that there are sort of heroes of Roman laughter, you know, people who, you know, they are funny, they are going to make you laugh. They're real kind of jokesters, but quite often they don't fit remotely with our assumptions about these guys. I mean, the one person who's repeatedly named as the funniest person in the whole world is the Roman orator Cicero, Marcus Tullius Cicero. Now, our prejudice about Cicero is that he's a frightfully pompous stuffed shirt, you know, getting an O rating and going banging on and on. Funny just doesn't come into it.
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B
His poetry definitely isn't funny and neither of it. Okay. He was sort of like witty speeches, I suppose, but there's wit.
- [19:08]
A
And the stories about Cicero is that not just that he was funny, but that he didn't know when to keep a good joke in. He would never exercise restraint. So at one point, he's off in the middle of the Civil War, and he's in a Civil War camp, military camp, where everybody is terribly, terribly gloomy because it's a Civil War. And Cicero gets into frightful trouble because he just can't help going around telling gags. Now, as soon as you put that element back into Cicero, it does make you rethink this pompous stuff. Toga kind of guy.
- [19:54]
B
Yeah, it really does. So it sounds like he was more of an off duty wit. You know, it's not necessarily that his writings, which are mass, you know, philosophical historical speeches, this sort of dreadful poetry, or, you know, maybe not dreadful, but anyway.
- [20:08]
A
I think, though, I could go on about Roman enough until the cats come home. But we get frightfully swamped, I think, in these different examples and the different theories. So what we are going to do is we're going to take a quick break and then come back to one very little Roman book that can help us a bit to get to the bottom of Roman jokes. This summer, serve up the cookout classics craft mayo and dressing. Toss green salads with delicious ranch dressing or zesty Italian. Serve smooth, craveably creamy potato salads with mayo. We all know it's not a cookout without craft.
- [21:01]
B
So basically, Mary, we have an actual Roman joke book. I think that's the crucial thing, isn't it? And we can, like, refine and think about this question of what the Romans found funny by looking at this actual joke book. Now, I have to confess, this is something you've brought to me. I have not read this Roman joke book before, and I read it especially for this episode, obviously, and found it deeply fascinating in all kinds of ways. But just to tell you what it is, it's called Philogellos, which means the lover of laughter in Greek. It's a collection, literally of 265 jokes. It's got a slightly complicated history. There are a few different versions of this. It was compiled in the 4th century CE, it was written in Greek, but it comes, as it were, from the Roman Empire, from the Roman world. And it is where your joke that you made at the beginning of this episode comes from. I happen to know about the dead friend. And we don't really know what it's for, right. Whether it's a kind of anthropological collection of some kind seems unlikely. Whether it's a kind of comedian's handbook, whether somebody collected it as an academic exercise. And it's got. Some of the surprising things for me were that it's collected into types, isn't it? So jokes about different kinds of people. And some of these are geographical. So there are jokes about people from very specific and particular cities in the Greek and Roman world. So there's a collection of jokes about people from Abdera, which is in northern Greece, like in modern times, it's sort of heading up towards the Bulgarian border. There are jokes about people from Kymi, which is a city on the Ionian coast of Turkey. So these people were just kind of hilarious.
- [23:02]
A
They were a bit like the, like the Irish jokes that we wouldn't now tell. But Irishmen are always terribly stupid.
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B
The people from Abder and Kymi are the butt of these jokes. And there are jokes about. Well, there's this wonderful word that's quite hard to translate, right? Scholastikos in Greek, which might mean some kind of nutty professor or egghead. You, I think go for egghead. And it's a person. Well, I was thinking about it as a sort of supposedly clever person who just misapplies logic. So they get everything a little bit wrong. And that's kind of funny. And actually sometimes it really is funny. To be honest, I was amazed by how funny these were. A lot of them are super unfunny. There are more father in law jokes than there are mother in law jokes. The mother in law joke does not appear. There are some misogynist jokes, but they are not as many as I thought. I'm going to tell you a misogynist joke. A woman hating man is burying his wife and they're standing at the graveside and a passerby says, who rests in peace here? And the husband, the bereaved husband says, me, because I've got rid of her at last. But there aren't that many of those actually. And you know, there are no racist jokes apart from these Abder Ekaimi ones which don't. It's not. They're not a kind of color you know, that's a whole different subject. But it's, you know, there are, there isn't a kind of seam of truly offensive jokes in the way that I think if you collected jokes from our culture, there would be more really cruel and offensive jokes about particular sections of society. These are my thoughts on it, Mary. I just, I don't know, you know, you've really properly thought about this. I just came at it completely innocently.
- [25:08]
A
I think you're right. I mean, there are some complete duds. You know the one about a stupid apprentice who was told by his master to cut somebody's nails and he starts to cry. The customer says, why are you crying? And the apprentice says, well, I'm scared I'm going to hurt you. You'll get sore fingers and the master will beat me. There's a kind of a cultural interest in that because we assume that the stupid apprentice is a slave and you've got that kind of sense of the violence of slavery comes up. But it's hard to say it's funny. And some of them do get a bit offensive. There's one joke which compares a guy who's been crucified, so therefore he must be a slave too. He looks as if he's flying or something. And you think there are some nasty pits along the way here. But by and large, I, I agree with you that they can be. Some of them can be a little bit moving, some of them can be kind of poignant, but they also take you into a foreign world, right? Which not at the level of the elite where you start to think you can hear the chat on the street. I mean, you know, another, not my absolute favorite, but another favorite is the man from Abdera. Again, the really stupid guy who sees a eunuch talking with the woman. He sees a eunuch talking with a woman and asks, is that the eunuch's wife? Someone who overhears this points out that eunuchs didn't have wives. So what does the man from Abdera say? Oh, it must be his daughter.
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B
Then a castration joke. We love a castration joke on Instant Classics. I like some of these sort of like almost childlike jokes. So there's one about a man from Kymi. Man from Kymi was swimming when it began to rain, so he decided just to dive down a little bit deeper to stop himself from getting wet. I mean, it's like, it's so silly. It's like a six year old's joke, but it is kind of, it is this sort of. It's A play about logic. It's a little bit of fun about. And it makes you see how funny the world really is somehow. I mean, how funny peculiar the world really is sometimes, these jokes and how
- [28:00]
A
if you operate with a different scheme of logic, you get a completely different result of what the world looks like. I mean, I think the one about the Scholasticos, the professor or the egghead was going on a journey and a friend asked him to buy two slave boys aged 15 and bring them back from the journey. Okay, says the Scholasticos, the egg head. And if I can't find the pair, I'll just buy one aged 30. And you see kind of people struggling with the mysteries of number there, you know, why, in what sense do we know that two boys aged 15 do not equal one man aged 30? And what happens if you try to unpick those conventions again? We're back in a world as often in these jokes where slavery is absolutely taken for granted. You know, these are two slave boy commodities or one slave man commodity. Another one I like is a patient who's talking to a doctor and he's a scholasticos, an egghead doctor. The patient says, doctor, doctor, when I get up from sleep, I feel dizzy for half an hour. What should I do? Scholasticos, the egghead doctor just replied, well, get up half an hour later then.
- [29:36]
B
I actually quite like that one. I quite like that one. Another one I like is there's a man with bad breath, because there's a whole bunch of jokes about people with bad breath for whatever reason because they're so funny. There's a man with bad breath and he's constantly looking up into the heavens and praying to the God Zeus and saying a lot of prayers. And eventually the God Zeus looks down on him and says, for heaven's sake, spare me. Have a little mercy. There are gods down in the underworld too. You know
- [30:13]
A
what? I thought about these eventually, after having, you know, probably read them for too long, too hard. They were sometimes funny, or I could make. I could make myself find them funny. But they were a truly wonderful window into some kind of ancient problems and questions and anxieties that we don't often think about. I mean, I think when it wouldn't be very original to say that what we joke about is often things that make us anxious, like deaths and funerals and whatever.
- [30:56]
B
Freud alert.
- [30:57]
A
So I went through these thinking, what are the. What are the real anxieties that are. That are sort of bubbling under the surface of these jokes? And there is something about kind of the body and Bodily smells and there's things about number and the conventions of logic and, you know, how we argue and what makes sense in the world or not. The thing that really made me most interested actually was the questions of identity that kept coming up. Now the simple question about how do you know who you are? That was obviously the theme of the dead friend joke. No, I'm not dead, you can see me here. But the man who told me you were dead was much more reliable than you. And there were a whole load of jokes which kind of play on that question. And it fitted into quite a lot of other things that we tend to forget about the ancient world, which is, you know, people in the ancient world don't have id, they can't prove who they are. You know, we don't know actually if you turn up to vote either in Greece or Rome, and as a citizens only vote. We don't know how you proved that you were a citizen. We even don't really know about how people thought about their own appearance, how they recognized themselves. I mean, there were rudimentary mirrors, but they weren't very good. And so you're living in a world where you don't have any papers and probably the one person whose appearance you don't know is yourself. Right? You know what other people look like. You don't really know what you look like yourself. And it was really striking how these jokes repeatedly turned to that as an anxiety. I mean, you found a good little one about the miser in the will, didn't you?
- [33:18]
B
Yeah, it's just a little gag really. So there's a miser, there's a, you know, very tight fisted bloke. He's so tight fisted that he, when he writes his will, he names himself as his sole heir.
- [33:30]
A
It's a silly gag, but the point underlying the gag is not quite knowing whether you are the same as yourself, whether you can be external to yourself, can you give money to yourself as if you were somebody else? And so I think there's more to it than, than scenes at first sight. It's about what's the nature of the person.
- [34:01]
B
Yeah.
- [34:02]
A
But I think that it is the time now for me to come clean about my favorite joke. Because there is, there is a favorite joke I have in the canon.
- [34:13]
B
I'll be the judge of this. I'll be the judge of this, how good this joke is. Right, I'm ready.
- [34:18]
A
It goes like this. There's Scholasticos and Egghead and a bald man. And bald men come quite often into this set of jokes. By the way, I think baldy is quite a. Is quite a good funny term in the ancient world. So an egghead, a bald man and a barber were making a journey together and they were camping out in a lonely place, a bit scared of robbers, et cetera. So they arranged for each of them to stay awake and in turn for four hours and guard their luggage. When it fell to the barber to keep the first watch and to stay awake for his four hours, it was very boring and he wanted to pass the time, so he shaved the head of the egghead to pass the time when he was keeping watch. And when his shift was done, he woke the egghead, the scholasticus up. The egghead sort of woke up, put his hands to his head, rubbing his head as he came round two, and he found he had no hair. What did he say? What an idiot that barber is. He's woken up baldy instead of me. Hmm. Well,
- [35:46]
B
it's funny in a really nerdy way, especially if you've heard your kind of brilliant exegesis about identity and not knowing who you really are. I think it might need a bit of context, but I don't know, actually, you know what I mean? If you exert a bit of imagination. I'm not saying that you're not Alan Carr here, Mary, but I could. What I suppose I'm saying is I can kind of imagine a really amazing comedian, like maybe sort of Stuart Lee or. Yeah, one of the greats, sort of taking some of these on and putting them into a kind of. Some kind of brilliant routine that is on some underlying level about identity and making it really work. I can also.
- [36:30]
A
There have been comic performances done from this and, you know, I've watched them on YouTube and stuff, and they have got people laughing. What I partly suspect is that people are laughing at themselves, laughing at jokes that are almost 2,000 years old. There's a kind of. The. The whole scenario of listening to Roman jokes is itself so ludicrous that you laugh and it. With my egghead, bullman and barber joke, I think we are lulled into the familiarity of that because it's a bit like an Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman went into a bar. And so we got these three characters and the story follows. Now, the truth is, this is the only ancient joke I found which starts off with three characters in the Englishman, Scotsman and Irishman variety.
- [37:29]
B
And it lands on a punchline in exactly the way that you would so like it. It has the structure it has, if not the laugh aloud quality necessarily. It Definitely has the structure of a modern joke because it lands on the gag and it has this unexpected twist and it's defamiliarizing and all of that.
- [37:44]
A
Yeah. And it's. And it's recognizable as a joke. I mean, because in order to laugh at a joke, you have to recognize that it's a joke. The problem with some of the ones that you get in this joke collection is that they don't have that rhetorical form. But here you're being told it's a joke. And then, of course, you know, even if it's slightly, as I suspect, your laughter was Charlotte, slightly out of politeness, Mary's told a joke and it would be very rude not to look as if at least half of it.
- [38:18]
B
Not at all, Mary.
- [38:19]
A
And that is how, you know, you go to, you know, something funny at the theatre and you're going ready to laugh. And in order to laugh, you need to be ready to laugh. So it doesn't necessarily say how good the jokes are. What it's doing, like here is saying, these are jokes. Laughter is allowed, everybody. In fact, laughter is required.
- [38:51]
B
And it works, does work. And it makes me, like. It just renews my sense of how important laughter is actually, in a funny way. You know, I mean, you know, I'm no theorist of laughter. I've got no idea. I know that it makes us feel better.
- [39:04]
A
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, in this case, I think what for me ended up being amazing was it took you into places that other bits of ancient literature don't quite reach. This may have been compiled by some academic nerd who was interested in laughter in the 4th century CE. May have been, but it's certainly getting down to the street corner in a way that most ancient literature doesn't take you there. And so there is something. I think there's something worth reading the Philagellos for, the Laughter Lover for. And you can find quite a lot of it. Everybody, actually, I. On the web, and they've usually omitted the bad ones, you'll be pleased to know. So you can just read a selection of good jokes from the Laughter Lover.
- [39:57]
B
Yeah. And it's a good thing to do. Like Mary. I think it takes you into that world. You know, it's almost like the world of the graffiti on the walls of Pompeii. Like, it's. We're not in the high. We're not in the world of Virgil and Tacitus here. We're in the. It sort of edges. You've seemingly into a world of what real people are actually saying to each other, which is incredibly precious and rare. And you know what? I honestly, I found more of them funny than I ever would have expected, which is a surprise given this grotesquely enormous gulf, really, that separates us from the Romans. Given the fact that I don't find the tavern scenes in Shakespeare folly, given that I don't find the jokes of 50 years ago from our country funny, I'm amazed by how funny some of these jokes really are. And thank you so much for introducing them to me, Mary, because I just didn't know them at all.
- [40:52]
A
Yeah, we could try and make the Laughter Lover a bit of a bestseller.
- [40:56]
B
Excellent as ever. We want to know your thoughts and comments, ideas, questions, and so if you have them, please do send them to us at Instant classics pod@gmail.com or on our social media stantclassicspod.
- [41:14]
A
Bye Bye.
- [41:22]
D
To some, he is the revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage.
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C
To others, he's a brutal despot accused of presiding over more civilian deaths than either Stalin or Hitler.
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D
Mao Zedong has one of the most recognizable faces in the world. Yet he started life in a muddy provincial village.
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C
A rebel son who hated his father survived a 6,000 mile walk across China and rose to become a figure of titanic proportions from Empire.
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D
The Goal Hangar World History Show. I'm Anita Anand.
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C
And I'm William DuranPaul.
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D
In this six part series, we're joined by one world renowned expert, Rana Mitter, to explore the life of the father of Communist China, Mao Zedong.
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C
We'll track his rise from a bookstore owner to a guerrilla commander. And we'll witness his ruthless elimination to secure total power. And we'll descend into the dark experiment of the Cultural Revolution, a time when ancient temples were burnt, children denounced their parents, and a nation worshiped a mango as a sacred relic.
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D
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