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Presented By: Classical Studies

Local(e) Jokes in Latin Comedy

Hans Bork, Assistant Professor of Classics, Stanford University

Latin comedy and artifacts of a mobile performance tradition Latin comedy and artifacts of a mobile performance tradition
Latin comedy and artifacts of a mobile performance tradition
This paper is a speculative approach to comic geography found in the Latin comic plays of Plautus. Plautus’ comedies are full of geographical detail. For example, characters regularly arrive from and depart on extended journeys across the Mediterranean; all the plays are set in various Greek locales but also blend in local Italian references; and speakers regularly concoct fantastical, punny placenames, even during serious moments. Most scholars evaluate such elements on the assumption that Plautus' plays were performed in Rome and, therefore, express a Roman perspective. This causes intractable literary and historical problems, however. Moreover, evidence for this Roman-centric limit is slim. If we remove it and consider the plays from the perspective of their original audience (so far as we are able), many of the more perplexing references—the “local(e) jokes” of my title—emerge as artifacts of a mobile performance tradition; that is, a kind of “expandable” comic routine that performers inserted and adapted depending on the venue.

Hans Bork is an Assistant Professor of Classics at Stanford University. His main research interests include humor and insult in the comedies of Plautus, various performance features of Latin comedy, and the sociolinguistics of ancient Italian languages.
Latin comedy and artifacts of a mobile performance tradition Latin comedy and artifacts of a mobile performance tradition
Latin comedy and artifacts of a mobile performance tradition

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