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The Roman comic dramatists enjoyed filling their plays with earsplitting
colloquial language: puns, sound gags, fantastic new words, and ridiculous
made-up names. In Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus (“The Braggart Soldier”), one
of the Roman plays on which the film A Funny Thing Happened on the
Way to the Forum is based, the original braggart soldier is given the fantastical
Greek name Pyrgopolynices, “He Who Conquers Many Towers.”
Perhaps the Roman playwrights’ most notable contribution to comedy
is the development and increased importance of the servus callidus, or
“cunning slave,” a brash, inventive, loudmouth, wise-guy character who
completely dominates the stage intrigue. The audience witnesses the
incongruity of the slave who exercises absolute authority over all free
persons whose lives he touches, and who, in the mirror of comedy, becomes
the heroic warrior, and all others follow him like servants (McCarthy,
17–34). Moreover, the comic slave possesses a freedom of action that
transcends his restricted personal status; so when he wins emancipation
from his masters at the end of the play, as he sometimes does, the audience
realizes that in a comedy of illusion and masquerade, he is in fact the
only person who is genuinely free.
Whether he actually achieves his freedom in the traditional sense,
through manumission, or simply continues to scheme and machinate with
brash impunity, the wily slave, whose spirit, poise, pluck, and wit often
make him the hero of the show, was by far the favorite character of the
Roman audience. The fact that this wretched individual who cowered at
the lowest level of everyday society could reign supreme on the dramatic
stage epitomizes the topsy-turvy, boisterous quality of Roman comedy at
its peak (Segal, 165–6; Moore, 40–1). Like the Roman Saturnalia, a wintertime
celebration of social disruption and role-reversal where slaves could
become masters for a day, the comedies granted the Roman audience
a temporary thrill of boundary-breaking mayhem in the fantasy world
of the theater, before returning to the rigid structures of the public and
private hierarchies that governed their daily lives (Barton, 123–5, 147–9).
One scholar describes why the Romans felt this strong cultural impulse
towards the blurring of edges: “The sense of alienation that attends the
perception of undue differentiation between people (and creatures and
things) creates an intense need and yearning for equality, identity, mimesis”
(Barton, 123).
At the very least, a day at the theater offered the average Roman a good
laugh, a chance to mingle socially with other people, and the satisfaction
of enjoying Roman culture’s up-to-date popular diversion. Such is the
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM (1966) 165