In interviews and hangouts I’ve often discussed my theory of humor and its importance to how we interpret humor, from how we use comedy to understand things about history, to how we decide whether a joke is actually racist or offensive rather than simply funny (or deserved: see The Art of the Insult & The Sin of the Slur and Katherine Cross on Tone Policing). Today I will spell that out in writing for continued use. Then I’ll show how historians need this kind of philosophy of humor to understand historical texts correctly, using examples from my study The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire.

My Theory of Humor in a Nutshell

Aristotle was the first to write on the philosophy of comedy, and like many things he was wrong about (even though he was otherwise right about a lot), he was wrong about this. His idea was that all humor is at someone’s expense (including self-deprecating humor, which is at your own expense), and thus is inherently always mean or demeaning (though he did not regard that as necessarily a bad thing). This of course can be refuted with a single word: puns. Puns were the most popular form of humor in Roman culture and had a place of humor in every other. Yet as jokes they aren’t at anyone else’s expense. Targets of humor can also be impersonal (like, “society as a whole,” or “tools” or “things that don’t even exist”). For these reasons there have been many attempts to fix Aristotle on this point (the Stanford Encyclopedia has a whole entry), some of which is sound, a lot of which is not.

There is a key to this, such that once you understand this analytical truth about jokes and humor, you’ll be able to assess the merits of any comedy, and explain why it is or is not funny—or why it’s bad or incompetent, or brilliant and hilarious: there is Humor of the True, and Humor of the False. Get which a particular joke is, and you can evaluate it; don’t get it, and your evaluation will fail. This conjoins with all other common rules of humor, of course, like the difference between punching up and punching down marking the difference between being funny and being mean, and the fact that, like all art, comedy always plays on exaggeration and hyperbole—putting something real in high relief, usually through fiction, both of which the audience understands, which allows them liberty to laugh. We can also laugh at the absurd—even at real horrific events—when we are not mocking its victims but the conditions or circumstances that are victimizing them, a more abstract instantiation of punching up rather than down. And so on. So I won’t be spelling out any complete theory of humor here, but rather highlighting just the one central axiom of it that I want to focus on today. I’ll then show how this kind of thinking changes how we operate even as a serious historian.

That axiom is that there are only two kinds of humor, Humor of the True and Humor of the False.

Humor of the True makes fun of something by telling the truth about it—through exaggeration. The hyperbole makes it literally false, of course, but if it captures an essence of something that is true, then we are looking at humor of the true. Which means humor of the true can only properly be funny if what it is making fun of is true. Of course the exaggeration need not be true, as that’s merely the figurative vehicle for the humor; but the essence of the joke, what’s actually being made fun of, does need to be true. Humor of the False makes fun of something by saying something everyone knows is false—where it is precisely that it is false that evokes laughter. Which means humor of the false can only properly be funny if what it is making fun of is false. There is always a truth, of course, in such humor. But it is not the exaggeration of something true that is forming the joke, but exaggeration in the other direction that is.

In either case, the role of hyperbole is merely the vehicle, not the heart, of a joke. Because human aesthetic reactions generally are triggered by exaggeration and hyperbole, which can manifest as exaggerated perfection or even exaggerated abstraction, and in many other ways, as I discuss in my section on that branch of philosophy in Sense and Goodness without God. See also my Bayesian Analysis of Shelley Park’s Uncanniness Thesis for an example, and my updates to Sense and Goodness in Musical Aesthetics, which includes reference to the growing neuroscience humor, from Robert Provine’s Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (2000) to Hurley, Dennett, and Adams’ Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (2011). Also relevant is the neuroscience of play, as explored in Stuart Brown’s Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul (2009), since playfulness and humor have many overlaps (as do the neuroscience of poetry and literature, which I also list studies of there).

To illustrate this axiom I will analyze one example of each kind of humor, one from Dave Chappelle and another from David Cross:

• First, watch this skit (even if you’ve seen it before). It’s “Dave Chappelle’s Night with Wayne Brady.”

There was in fact a whole cultural backstory to this skit that, if you did not know it, might leave you unclear as to what the joke was. Brady had long faced relentless critique and mockery as “not black enough” (essentially calling him an Oreo in all but the word), even previously on Chappelle’s Show, and he eventually spoke out about that, arguing he can be black any way he wants, and explaining that thinking (or worse, promoting) otherwise only perpetuates racist stereotypes that affect even what young black men think they can do or be like (hear Brady himself tell the story about Chappelle and another one about Bill Maher).

Brady was known to be a super nice guy, and he was into supposedly “white” things like musicals and improv acting. The very notion that these were “white” things (even being thought the nicest man on the planet) and not “black” things is racist. They are the flip side of malevolent racism, manifesting benevolent racism, a stereotyping that purports to be complimenting but in fact is insulting, and reinforcing of prejudice (just like, for example, benevolent sexism; see Wikipedia’s article on benevolent prejudice). Chappelle and Brady built their skit out of this backstory.

As such, the skit is brilliantly employing Humor of the False: everyone knows (or is supposed to know) that this depiction of Wayne Brady is completely false. And that is what the skit’s humor draws on: that this is exactly the opposite of who Wayne Brady really is. But as always there is still a truth in the skit: that people think you aren’t black enough unless you act like he does in that skit. And likewise hyperbole is still the device: what Brady does in the scene is even an exaggeration, an extreme, of the stereotype, because all humor plays on exaggeration or distortion. But the core truth is the stereotype being exaggerated. Which we must understand to be false to get the joke as intended.

The entire bit is a masterful critique of racism. But if you don’t know the backstory, you might not get what the joke is. It would then just be an unfunny depiction of horrific brutality beheld by a trapped and terrified witness (Chappelle, playing the straight man, also as himself). You’d wonder why there is a laugh track on it. But if you are a racist, and also didn’t know the backstory (if, for instance, you had no idea who Wayne Brady was or any of the dispute around his supposed “blackness”), you might mistake this skit as Humor of the True: that what it is making fun of is black people. “Ha ha! Isn’t that just really what black people are like!?” By mistaking the joke as intending the depiction of Brady to be an exaggeration of a reality, and thus as Humor of the True, you’d laugh at it for much darker and ignominious reasons. What makes the joke work, then, and not falter as racist, is the knowledge of the audience that this is Humor of the False. Being able to tell the difference is crucial to understanding the joke and the values and social message behind it.

• Second, listen to this skit (even if you’ve heard it before; from minute 33:30 to 36:38). It’s David Cross’s bit “George W. Bush Eats a Jew Baby.”

The opening bit here, about the Bush administration conspicuously raising terrorism alert levels whenever bad political news hit, to benefit from the poll bump the President always got when alert levels went up, has some truth to it. But the part I want to focus on is the middle and closing bit, about how Cross jokes that he’s sure there must be some guy whose job it is to raise the terror alert whenever something bad happens, and the example he invents is Bush eating a “Jew baby” on live television and gloating about it, even requesting another—and the need for all the political machine scrambling to invent apologetics for why that’s not really all that bad and you should still reelect him. Cross then concludes with the notion that it is impossible for a President to be impeached for any crime, no matter how horrific (a point that resonates even more now after Donald Trump).

This is Humor of the True. Obviously it’s false—George W. Bush would never do that, nor ever did anything remotely comparable. But it exaggerates a core truth, just as later Donald Trump would openly do with his dark remark that he could murder someone in public and still get elected. As is usual for political criminals who strive to maintain deniability and distance, Bush’s impeachable crimes were more abstract and subtle, from implementing brutal torture without trial (a literal war crime and a violation of the core values of the United States Constitution) and abandoning his oath to protect his nation from Hurricane Katrina, to causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and mutilations (including thousands of American citizens) by lying his way into a war in Iraq that really had no valid purpose but greed (also involving himself in numerous war crimes, and federal crimes, ranging from negligence, conspiracy, and manslaughter to suborning perjury and falsifying documents), even obstruction of justice, and spying on American citizens without warrants (in direct violation of the Constitution he swore to defend and uphold). He was a very impeachable President. Yet, in our system, invulnerable. This is the “truth” inside David Cross’s joke.

Unlike Chappelle’s skit about Wayne Brady, which played on what was being depicted being entirely false, and quite the opposite of reality, David Cross’s bit about George W. Bush played on what was being depicted being in its essence true, placing an exaggerated spotlight on reality—that Presidents can commit any crimes they want with impunity; impeachment is effectively impossible. The depths of the exaggeration making this a joke and not just a sober statement of fact include: cannibalism; of a baby; who was Jewish. Context is pertinent (Cross is himself Jewish), but the truth captured in this is the inevitable immunity Bush could have against even the extent of outrage usually visited upon the deliberate abuse of Jews (with a bonus joke hidden in that one for those familiar with the history of Anti-semitism: Cross is cleverly reversing what is usually an Anti-semitic trope).

So that’s the difference between Humor of the True and Humor of the False. Both forms of humor mix the true and the false together, but what distinguishes one from the other is whether the joke plays on the underlying idea being true (American Presidents can commit crimes with impunity; even ones that they themselves and their inevitable defenders would consider reprehensible) or false (Wayne Brady is a murderous psychopathic street thug; and that that’s what it means to be black).

Puns, of course, are usually Humor of the False. Almost by definition what is funny about any joke, bit, skit, or scene that operates on a pun is that something happening in it is fundamentally false. “A construction worker walked into a bar with a slab of asphalt and ordered one beer for himself and one for the road” is funny because it’s false: we understand “one for the road” usually to mean he will take it to go and drink it himself later, whereas here the pun makes it mean that it’s for an inanimate piece of road, which doesn’t drink beers. There is a truth, of course—the play on words is playing on something that is true (the word “road” can mean both an abstract journey and a literal object). But the joke turns on what is false here. And it is only by understanding that it is false that you will find the joke funny. While this is usually the case for puns, I cannot say puns are never Humor of the True; I welcome readers who can think of examples posting them in comments!

But to aid in that I will pause for a moment to tell you the only joke I myself have ever written: “A guy and a mathematician are out on a first date and eventually their conversation turns to sexual preferences, so the guy asks his date what her kinks are, and she answers, ‘I’m not that kinky. I’m only into standard deviations’.” This can be accounted Humor of the True owing to a single word: “that.” If the ending line were “I’m not kinky; I’m only into standard deviations” then it would be Humor of the False (the deviations she’s talking about aren’t sexual but mathematical, just as a piece of asphalt doesn’t drink beer). But by saying “I’m not that kinky; I’m only into standard deviations” she implies she does mean by “standard deviations” sexual preferences, ones that deviate from wholesome but are commonplace and thus not regarded as all that kinky. In this case the pun on the unrelated mathematical term plays on something true about that term’s use here (the standardness of their deviancies). But either way, the hyperbole that carries the joke here lies, as in many a joke, in the element of completion and surprise—in this case, in dropping a double entendre that completes the joke by back-referencing the start of the joke (that she’s a mathematician). Of course, “the hyperbole of the unexpected” is why irony is an entire form of humor.

Analyzing Humor

As everybody knows, Dave Chappelle has been criticized for tone-deaf humor about the trans movement. One can analyze this in a straightforward philosophical way: in this subject his criticized jokes always fail at the axiomatic requirements of humor. Even when he has conversations with critics, he still fails to comprehend the distinction between gender and sex—which is the fundamental core of sexism. Thinking sex dictates gender is literally the lie that both the feminist and trans movements are all about dismantling (see Some Philosophy of Homo- and Transphobia, Supreme Court Style). Chappelle thinks he is deploying Humor of the True, but the core of his jokes (that sex and gender are the same thing or inexorably bound, and thus there is no gap between biology and culture) is false (see What Dave Chappelle Gets Wrong about Trans People and Comedy and Dave Chappelle Is Oblivious to His Own Blind Spots). This mismatch makes his jokes not funny. It’s like if he got up there and made fun of people who believe the Earth is round: the fact that he actually believes it isn’t would make that bit very un-funny. People would be embarrassed for him—and if laughing at all, laughing at him, not his jokes.

Chappelle gets the theory, because he expressed feeling it himself in reaction to one of his own skits long before, when the target was supposed to be racism, but the joke came eerily too close to just being racist (see On The Skit That “Killed” Chappelle’s Show). There he was attempting Humor of the False, a black faerie in black face trying to teach black people to act “more black” (the idea of which is, of course, false: stereotypes are not “how people should be”), but the bit didn’t exaggerate in the right way—its exaggerations were peripheral (it’s a faerie; it’s a black man in black face), but at its core, instead, it simply replicated reality (inadvertently selling the white racist belief that “this is how black people look,” “this is how black people should act”), which isn’t funny anymore. Yet in that case it wasn’t his fault—it was, after all, only racists who were laughing at that skit the wrong way (mistaking his Humor of the False for Humor of the True). He (and most of his audience) fully intended and understood it was making fun of racism, not reinforcing it, and it was only racist audience members who may have been seeing it the other way around. But it did skirt too close to a fail, warranting taking more care in deciding how to send up racism, to make sure only massively clueless racists would fail to get that the joke is on them. And indeed, I think the example skit I used earlier illustrates this point.

You might contrast all that with the title of my article Attack of the Lycanthropic Transsexuals! which is about all the scientific and factual reasons transphobes are wrong about practically everything. The title is a joke based on it being a reply to a transphobe who attacked me for finding a transwoman cute and then went on about the threat of “transexuals” and how if there can be transwomen there can be transwolves and people can just go around claiming they’ve literally “transitioned” into being a wolf! My title is thus all Humor of the False. Calling transwomen transsexuals now is alarmist, not conventional or respectful or even comprehending; his fear of people declaring themselves wolves humorously sounds like a fear of lycanthropes (werewolves); and my conjunction of lycanthropic and transsexual makes fun of his false belief that this is the same thing as transitioning a gender. Yes, context is what makes the title ironic and thus funny rather than transphobic, but as we’ve seen, all humor requires context to comprehend.

In other words, once you get that this is Humor of the False and thus mocking transphobic tropes rather than endorsing them, you get the joke. In much the same way, this is how you tell a funny rape joke. Whereas, this was not. Just Analyze Daniel Tosh’s joke by this axiom. He said to a woman in his audience claiming no rape jokes are funny, “Wouldn’t it be funny if, like, five guys raped her, like, right now?” Which was really an impromptu attempt to shut down a heckler in his audience that utterly failed at its purpose—to prove, by giving an example, that her heckling claim that “no rape joke is funny” is false. He instead walked right into her heckle by making a rape joke that wasn’t funny, as if to prove her point. That’s maximum fail for a comedian.

Tosh could have instead disproved her point by showing he actually knows what a funny rape joke is (“it’s all about how you construct the joke,” and who or what it’s actually making fun of, as George Carlin long ago explained). Was Tosh’s joke Humor of the True or Humor of the False? You might say it can’t be Humor of the True, because it actually wouldn’t be funny if someone in his audience were suddenly gangraped in front of him. Unless, of course, he meant it actually would be funny—which would be horrifyingly like a racist laughing at Chappelle’s jokes for exactly the wrong reasons. But that’s precisely why Tosh’s joke isn’t funny. Whereas if he were aiming at Humor of the False, which means trying to make fun of the fact that what he claimed is funny wouldn’t be funny, he completely botched the joke. Because then there’s no punchline.

Here’s a punchline: same joke, exactly as reported, only in a single beat Tosh adds, as if coming to a sudden genuine realization, “Oh fuck! That wouldn’t be funny. Feminists ruin everything!” That carries it to Humor of the True by making fun of men who think feminists proving gangrape isn’t funny are ruining things. This would be a self-deprecating variant, to be sure (as this version of his joke, if performed correctly, would imply he’s one of those men, suddenly realizing feminists are right). In meta-fashion this would be a joke acknowledging the audience member was right while ironically proving she was wrong—as the joke in that formulation is about rape, yet is funny. Which would itself be funny.

The axiom of Humor of the True and Humor of the False is therefore a valuable analytical tool. As is understanding the crucial role of exaggeration and hyperbole in comedy; and, of course, just fiction in general—most jokes require making stuff up, or the comedian pretending to a point of view they don’t actually hold. Humor can’t be used as a literal window into reality. If you don’t know it’s playing on hyperbole and fiction, even to talk about reality in some way, you will be catastrophically misled. But more importantly, to get what a joke is actually about, what it is actually purporting to be funny (and thus whether it actually is funny or not, to anyone of sound moral disposition), requires understanding the structure of humor. And this axiom is an essential part of that.

History

Historians can learn a lot about the history of a time and place by studying its comedy. But they first have to recognize that what they are reading is comedy—and how to analyze comedy. For example, unlike for Jesus, for Socrates we have a comedy written to make fun of him, which was not only based on eyewitness knowledge, but it was even performed when he was in the audience. This is a fantastic resource, because it represents what we call counter-biased testimony (see Proving History, Ch. 4): a comedian making fun of someone is typically going to approach their subject critically rather than fawningly, or will certainly mention critical points of view (even if only to mock or make fun of them). But to get at this information a historian has to recognize the Clouds of Aristophanes is comedy—and thus not a straightforward narrative of what Socrates taught or did. It will certainly contain hyperbole and disingenuous misrepresentations; and it will tell jokes about him that will move between Humor of the True and Humor of the False.

Problematically for a historian, distinguishing which is which will have relied a lot on the audience’s personal knowledge of Socrates and his contemporary reputation (as we have, for example, for Wayne Brady or American Presidential history), which we no longer have access to—so it’s harder to reconstruct. Historians have the difficult task of trying to figure that out, even just to get at what usable information may be hidden in all the hyperbole and fiction of a joke. And only when we can make this distinction for each joke told about Socrates can we reconstruct anything historically reliable about him from such a text. If historians a thousand years from now have to reconstruct something true about Wayne Brady from that single Chappelle’s Show skit, they’d better figure out it’s Humor of the False and not Humor of the True. Likewise in reverse for George Bush from David Cross’s routine: is his joke Humor of the False, and therefore meant to be funny because American Presidents were actually being regularly impeached and exiled, imprisoned, or executed even for trivial things (as one might say Socrates was)? Or is it Humor of the True, and thus exaggerates their immunity but not in essence?

Last week I made note of the similar problem of historians too readily trusting polemicists to be telling the truth about what their enemies claim or believe. That Christian apologists tend to be liars rather changes how you read them (see How We Know Acts Is a Fake History and the links to many more examples provided therein). And this hasn’t changed. If historians a thousand years from now had to reconstruct any claim I have made—like, say, why it makes sense to doubt Jesus existed even as an ordinary-but-overblown man—based solely on my critics, they would get everything about it wrong. Because my critics rarely tell the truth about what I have said or argued (see What I Said at the Brea Conference for some examples). The same is true for humor, which is a form of lying, just one that is deemed morally acceptable because it is honest about its dishonesty—no one is intentionally being misled by David Cross when he suggests George W. Bush would eat a live baby on television. Everyone knows that’s false, as are the prosaic reactions and behaviors of the apologists for it that Cross acts out. We all know reality wouldn’t play out that way. But we also know the hyperbole exaggerates a very real truth about our class system and its injustice and inequality. Can a historian figure that out?

I analyze a few examples of this being a methodological problem in my book The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire (e.g., pp. 286-91). I’ll reproduce one of those here, and here apply the axiom of the day. The controversy in question begins with this:

According to Thomas Africa [in Science and the State in Greece and Rome, Wiley 1967], “the Roman state intervened twice to suppress inventions which seemed detrimental to the public good.” There are in fact only two such stories, in over three hundred years of Roman history. That is hardly sufficient to constitute a ‘trend’. Modern scholars nevertheless repeat the same two examples over and over again as if they were representative of ancient culture. In fact, in both cases these stories were told because they were not representative, but in fact remarkable.

The first example involves a throwaway line in Suetonius about Vespasian rejecting a contract offer and making some quip about it that might in fact have itself been a joke (which I analyze there, Scientist. p. 288), but even if it wasn’t, it actually involved no invention at all—that was a contrivance of an over-speculating modern translator. So in that case historians keep citing as an example something that never happened in the first place, a methodological error of the first order. But as that case is ambiguous with respect to its humor I’ll skip that here and jump to the second example—which has now been reduced to the only example:

The only other evidence Africa (or anyone) can offer is a story told about Tiberius. A story invented by a comedian. In his satirical novel the Satyricon [§51-52], once again Petronius describes a scene in which a wealthy pretender named Trimalchio is boasting of his tableware, in the process relating stories that are embarrassingly false (mentioning, for example, that he has a bowl showing Daedalus shutting Niobe inside the Trojan horse), thus revealing his humorous ignorance of history and literature.

If it needs to be said, Daedalus, Niobe, and the Trojan Horse all existed at different times in mythic history, at different places, and in completely unrelated stories (which makes this comparable to saying Abraham Lincoln had sealed Robin Hood in Al Capone’s vault).

It is here, in this context, that Trimalchio adds the following story:

If glassware were unbreakable, I would prefer it to gold, though now glassware is very cheap. In fact there was once a craftsman who made a glass bowl that was unbreakable. He was given an audience with the emperor, bringing along his gift. He had the emperor hand it back and threw it to the floor. The emperor was as frightened as he could be, but the man picked the bowl up from the ground, and it was dented just like a vessel made of bronze. He took a little hammer from his shirt and fixed it perfectly without any problem. By doing so he thought he had made his fortune, especially after the emperor said to him, ‘No one else knows how to temper glassware like this, do they?’ Just see what happened! After he said ‘No’, the emperor had his head chopped off, because if this invention were to become known, we would treat gold like dirt.

Now, Africa (and other modern historians after him) keep citing this story as an actual event that really happened, and then use that as evidence Romans were hostile to invention and innovation. You can probably by now tell why that is a face-palming mistake. This is a joke. It is not history. This never happened. Just like George Bush never ate a baby on live television and Wayne Brady was never a murderous pimp. To fail to get this is another methodological error of the first order.

How should historians actually be analyzing this passage? First, of course, they have to recognize it’s a joke, not a historical report. Second, they have to recognize who is telling this story and how the author (traditionally assumed to be Petronius, a companion of Nero—so this would be in the early 60s A.D.) has represented that character to us, in general but especially in this very same scene. And third, with that information in hand, we need to ask if this is Humor of the True (“Why yes, emperors would totally do a thing like that!”) or Humor of the False (“Wow. This Trimalchio is an idiot!”).

As I followed in Scientist:

From the context we can be certain of two things: the story is either untrue or wildly incorrect, and Trimalchio is being made to look like an idiot for telling it. Thus his belief that unbreakable glass would make gold worthless (or indeed that anyone of sense would think such a thing) is a fiction designed to communicate to the reader Trimalchio’s shocking stupidity. We can thus conclude that no emperor ever did what he reports, or certainly not for any such reason. We can also assume no such thing was ever invented. Though flexible glass is a staple of modern fiber optics, and modern transparent plastics would have been described as ‘glass’ in antiquity, it is very unlikely anything comparable to these was ever made in ancient Rome.

I then analyze how the joke evolved over time in the retelling, as it appears in later authors, who increasingly also start to take it seriously, even “fixing” its ridiculous elements to make them sound more plausible, having lost track of the fact that it originated in a comedy. Eventually this tall tale “had come to resemble comparable urban legends today about oil corporations buying out or assassinating the inventors of cars powered by tap water or hemp.” Which actually “represents values exactly opposite to those Africa infers,” since then the emperor (commonly assumed to be Tiberius) “is being portrayed as a villain, and his action condemned, not elevated as sound government policy,” and “besides being entirely untrue, it is also entirely unique, never once being represented as typical, but to the contrary, as wholly atypical.”

So this example disappears as well. The notion that evidence historians lean on for a grand conclusion all falls apart the moment you start pulling at its threads will at this point sound familiar to many of my readers (who know I’ve found it describes practically the entire field of Jesus studies: e.g., see Captain DadPool on Who Is Inventing Workarounds: Historicists or Mythicists?). But today we are interested in the humor, and what we should be learning from this text, as historians, about its author’s society and its values. First, we should observe that there is a version of this tale in the third century historian Dio Cassius that actually shows no knowledge of the comedic urban legend found in other authors. And Dio’s version actually could be true—and thus the real event Petronius is deliberately having Trimalchio get ridiculously wrong (and Petronius’s readers in that time would have known this, just as viewers today know the backstories to Wayne Brady and George Bush, and thus readily get those jokes about them).

As I point out, “Dio explains how Tiberius started out making praiseworthy decisions, but then his behavior swerved into appalling injustice and cruelty, which Dio demonstrates with a list of examples, all of which he clearly assumed his readers would agree were crimes, in principle if not in fact,” and thus not representative of good or standard policy. It is in this list that Dio relates a saga in which Tiberius becomes jealous of an engineer’s success and fame, and eventually exiles him from the capital. Then:

The architect approached Tiberius to crave pardon, and while doing so purposely let fall a crystal goblet. And though it was bruised in some way or shattered, yet by passing his hands over it he promptly exhibited it whole once more. For this he hoped to obtain pardon, but instead the emperor put him to death.

Here we have something understood quite differently. There is nothing here about an invention at all, much less it being suppressed, for any reason much less Trimalchio’s. It’s just a tyrant being a dick to a guy he loathed who tried to impress him with a lame Las Vegas magic trick. Hence, I note, “Several scholars have come to the same conclusion” as me on this. Ergo, “we can dismiss Africa’s claim that the Roman government ever suppressed scientific technologies” (as well as a lot of other like claims: see, for example, Imperial Roman Economics as an Example of an Overthrown Consensus).

Now that we know the real story Trimalchio is being made to get entirely wrong, we can discern that this is Humor of the False, albeit under several layers of comedy. The first layer is that the author Petronius is mocking a certain upstart social group that members of Petronius’s social class found crass and embarrassing: imperial slaves, with inadequate education, being made freedmen and tasked with running powerful government contracts and agencies, and thus becoming social and economic upstarts, complete with pretending to be cultured and educated. Something similar happens with an earlier joke some modern historians also erroneously took as fact—missing the whole point—when another poser (Eumolpus) was made to lament the decline of the arts, in a discourse that gets everything about art wrong (and in an era we have archaeologically confirmed was experiencing in fact a glorious advancement of the arts, not a decline: Scientist, pp. 273-74; cf. pp. 270ff.).

At that layer we have Humor of the True: this type of person really did exist, and Petronius’s social class were really annoyed and embarrassed by them; but here the extent of their folly is exaggerated to humorous effect. Most real persons of Trimalchio’s situation will not have been anywhere near this stupid. But the essence of Petronius’s complaint would carry as true. Then, at the next layer we have Humor of the False: everything Trimalchio is saying is funny because it is false. In this particular story, he is so stupid he doesn’t realize there is no possible way fixable glass would tank the price of precious metals, whose value is driven by an entirely different economics. To think otherwise would be as dumb as claiming the discovery of diamonds or plastic would make gold worthless. And people of Petronius’s class were well aware of this. Likewise, Trimalchio’s “yokel” notion of Tiberius’s motives in killing the man are funny because they are also false, showing him completely oblivious to the actual thought processes of such a tyrant (as well as the real story of what happened), demonstrating his political ignorance as well as historical and economic. Hence the joke is that what he’s saying is false. It’s thus Humor of the False. And you won’t understand anything correctly about Roman society if you don’t get that.

Once you do get that, though, you do learn a lot of things about the society that produced this joke. And they happen to be exactly the opposite of what Africa and some other scholars mistakenly thought: the joke, correctly understood, demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of how a precious metals commodities market actually operates, how suppressing invention would actually be censurable rather than admirable, and how persons of Trimalchio’s station might not be as savvy about such things as his Senatorial contemporaries, and those contemporaries were a bit annoyed and embarrassed by this, because such men were being elevated in station supposedly beyond merit. It also shows the relatively recent invention of blown glass and its rising role in elite dinnerware, and the common knowledge of its actual physical properties and limitations (and, from this joke’s subsequent treatment, it shows us things about how urban legends spread then, and how ancient historians used sources). Thus there is a lot of history to extract from a passage like this (especially when these points can be corroborated by other independent lines of evidence, which I show in Scientist they can). But to extract that requires getting the joke. If you don’t, you’ll get entirely wrong ideas, possibly even quite opposite the reality, as happened to Thomas Africa and subsequent historians who repeated his mistake.

So comedy is important. And historians need to know how to recognize it, and analyze it correctly. Then they can really learn things about the society telling those jokes. We can likewise learn or come to understand things about our own society by likewise correctly analyzing our jokes.