Raising a Laugh: Gift for Community Building or Disease to be Remedied

Raising a Laugh: Gift for Community Building or Disease to be Remedied Basil Lumsden O.S.B. (bio) The comedian Jerry Seinfeld has a famous, frequently quoted observation about comedy: "Comedy starts with anger."1 I am interested in the relationship between this anger and laughter-raising, especially within the context of Benedictine community life. Can laughter at oneself and raising a laugh from others at oneself be a kind of therapeutic tool for dealing with psychological issues arising from anger?2 Is this a type of laughter which strengthens the human being and community or damages both? To this end, I shall examine the classical Latin-Roman cultural understandings of laughter and joking in order to gauge the influence of this culture of laughter-raising on Saint Benedict as a sixth-century, Latin-speaking Christian. Do we encounter this influence in his monastic Rule, Regula Benedicti?3 I shall explore this with a particular focus on the inclusio4 consisting of RB 6.8 and RB 49.7.5 I shall then place an explored pagan Latin cultural snapshot of joking and a culture of laughing within this inclusio to give context to a considered interpretation of RB 6.8 and RB 49.7. I propose that St. Benedict might have been responding to different types of laughter in these two passages of his Rule, from his experience of pagan Roman culture. To help answer these questions, I shall begin by examining the world of angry telling-it-as-it-is6 comedy in the Latin comedy writer Plautus (3rd–2nd centuries BC) with a view to uncovering the [End Page 1] particular features of the scurra (scurrilous jokester, from which the word "scurrility" is derived) and his behavior. Having done this, we shall look at the late antique Roman world and its stressors leading to a need for letting off steam using humor. We shall see some of these jokes, and additional types of humor, in concrete form from Macrobius, a fifth-century Christian author and social commentator, and from the fifth-century jokebook, Philogelos. Next, I consider the Christian world: does the New Testament say anything about scurrility? Furthermore, in Christian community, what kinds of laughter and jokes are to be banned and which ones lived with, and which jokes are to be encouraged? Does humor have the potential to build or damage community life? That is, in this context, a world of Roman theatre, jokes, scurrility, and edgy comedy, we might then deduce something of why St. Benedict reacts so strongly against laughter-raising in RB 6.8 (scurrility), but hints at a different laughter-raising he might be happy to live with, or even encourage, in RB 49.7—some intelligent, healthy jesting, perhaps? Having answered these questions, I offer some insights into the formation process of men and women in Benedictine formation and indeed, to the ongoing formation of Benedictine monks and nuns regarding community humor and laughter-raising. I conclude by positing that the only type of laughter-raising St. Benedict seems to encourage in a Benedictine monastery is that of the intelligent, community-building type. AN ANGRY ANCIENT WORLD We begin with the plays of Titus Macchius Plautus (254–185 BC) as we have them today. Plautus lived in a time of perpetual war, starvation, and overall social unrest. The suffering caused by this cultural and social context of violence, human trafficking, slavery, starvation, and overall abuse of the human being at this time is therefore very important to understand the world of the ancient scurra.7 Jerry Seinfeld's observation becomes rather apposite to Plautus's identification of the scurra from the context of the anger consequent upon human suffering. First, let us call to mind the environment of war within which Plautus's plays emerged. War between Rome and the surrounding Italian peoples, and with her Mediterranean rivals, was the order of [End Page 2] the day.8 Within the timeframe of these wars, tens of thousands of people were enslaved by the Roman Republic. The influx of all these enslaved peoples into Rome gives us an idea of what the resultant large legal class of servi (slaves), coupled with...