COMEDY

122 LAUGHTERevidence for his sense of humour is scant. The early church equatedlevity and mirth with foolishness and ignorance. Ecclesiastes states that,The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart offools is in the house of mirth. It is better to hear the rebuke of thewise, than for a man to hear the song of fools. For as the cracklingof thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool: this also is vanity.(Ecclesiastes 7:4–6)Early Christian converts in Rome founded their principles of conduct inopposition to the luxurious and debauched lives of their pagan masters.Christian theology actively rewarded simplicity and poverty, and foundvirtue in privation and self-control. The abrogation of the body and therigid imposition of pious abstinence made physical pleasure suspicious.In Philippa Pullar’s words, ‘the body had to be broken; it had to beabused and maltreated, its reactions, sensations and natural functionsbecame to the Christians a real and terrible neurosis’ (Pullar, 2001:37).The contrast between Roman and Christian attitudes to laughter isapparent in the story of St Genesius, a pagan Roman actor and now thepatron saint of comedians. During a performance for the EmperorDiocletian that parodied the Christian baptism, Genesius received anangelic visitation that delivered an admonition. His laughter quicklyturned to mortification and servility as he asked forgiveness of hisnewly discovered God. Diocletian, who was expecting a laugh, had himstretched, beheaded, and burnt (Jacobson, 1997:163–164). Laughter,then, was a vulgar eruption of the body that contained the indecentexcess of paganism and was impudent, raucous, and ill-disciplined:‘Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenancethe heart is made better’ (Ecclesiastes 7:3).As we saw in Chapter 4, governing the body requires the regulationand the repression of certain corporeal traits. In early Christianity, itwas conventional to understand the human subject as fundamentallytorn between the animalistic urges of the flesh and the sanctity of apious soul. The earliest ascetic condemnation of laughter, authored in thesecond century by Clement of Alexandria, conceded that laughter washuman, but urged Christians to restrain it as they might similar bestialinstincts:For, in a word, whatever things are natural to men we must noteradicate from them, but rather impose on them limits andsuitable times. For man is not to laugh on all occasions because he