{"id":202,"date":"2014-09-12T03:32:47","date_gmt":"2014-09-12T03:32:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/classics\/?p=202"},"modified":"2014-09-12T03:32:48","modified_gmt":"2014-09-12T03:32:48","slug":"laugh-as-the-romans-laughed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/classics\/2014\/09\/12\/laugh-as-the-romans-laughed\/","title":{"rendered":"Laugh as the Romans Laughed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Bob Mankoff<\/strong>, the cartoon editor of the <em>New Yorker<\/em>, regularly posts a newsletter online. This week, his dispatch highlights the world&#8217;s oldest joke book: the Philogelos, or &#8220;Laughter-lover&#8221; which was written in Greek. <strong>Mary Beard<\/strong>, one of the most famous and prolific Classicists alive, agreed to discuss some of the jokes for his newsletter, starting with one delivered recently by a British stand-up comic:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;A few years ago, the English standup comic Jim Bowen presented a show with jokes that were based entirely on the one surviving ancient joke book, the Philogelos. It\u2019s a collection of some two hundred and sixty short gags, written in Greek; it probably dates, in the form we have it, to the fifth century\u00a0<small>A.D.<\/small>, but some of the jokes go back centuries earlier. I particularly like the one about the thuggish, philistine Roman who destroyed Corinth in 146\u00a0<small>B.C.<\/small>\u00a0When he was overseeing the transport of the precious antiques that he had looted from the city, he said to the ships\u2019 captains: &#8216;Don\u2019t break anything, or you\u2019ll have to replace it.'&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/cartoons\/bob-mankoff\/when-in-rome-laugh-romans-laughed\" target=\"_blank\">Read on, at the NewYorker.com.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor of the New Yorker, regularly posts a newsletter online. This week, his dispatch highlights the world&#8217;s oldest joke book: the Philogelos, or &#8220;Laughter-lover&#8221; which was written in Greek. Mary Beard, one of the most famous and prolific Classicists alive, agreed to discuss some of the jokes for his newsletter, starting [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":698,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/classics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/classics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/classics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/classics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/698"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/classics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/classics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/classics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions\/204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/classics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/classics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/classics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}