I’m a member of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. As such, I regularly receive book reviews in my email on recent scholarly publications dealing with the ancient Mediterranean world.

One of these recent reviews was by Ioannis Konstantakos of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Professor Konstantakos discussed Humanist Comic Elements in Aristophanes and the Old Testament by Benjamin Lazarus.  The book sounds extremely interesting. Here are a couple of paragraphs from Professor Konstantakis’ review:

Jonah and the Dionysus of the Frogs exemplify another comic prototype, the “Comic Failure” (Lazarus’ term) or “comic anti-hero”, as he might be called in contrast to the heroic Aristophanic protagonists discussed by Cedric Whitman (Aristophanes and the Comic Hero, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). This kind of character becomes laughable by constantly failing to live up to the expectations of his role. The buffoonish Dionysus proves unable to judge poetry correctly and even to impersonate Heracles competently, despite his celebrated associations with the theater. Jonah cannot meet the requirements of his prophetic mission and repeatedly fails to recognize the will of Yahweh. There are additional analogies in the two story patterns, as both anti-heroes experience a katabasis into the world of death (the belly of the fish in Jonah is expressly likened to Sheol), but return without real improvement. Both Dionysus and Jonah are parodies of serious models, respectively Heracles’ dark journey to Hades and Elijah’s prophetic career. Their incompetence is underlined by figures of lower status, such as Dionysus’ slave Xanthias or the Gentile Ninevites, who successfully perform the very tasks which these comic anti-heroes ridiculously mismanage. In this case, Lazarus has traced an important satirical structure, probably as old as the Margites and applicable to many other comic figures, from Master Ford to Iznogoud.

The final chapter brings together Wealth and Tobit, two works revolving around an ordinary protagonist, a “Comic Everyman”. Both works are set in a world of mundane suffering and injustice and use a domestic, down-to-earth kind of humor as a means of relief from the difficulties of life. In this connection, another line of enquiry would be worth pursuing. Tobit, a character at once ridiculous for his rigidity and sympathetic for his sufferings, and thus evoking a complex response from the audience, is closer to the personages of Menander than to Aristophanes’ Chremylus. Like Menandrian heroes, the characters of Tobit have a limited understanding of the universe, and their apparent tragedy is eventually turned into comedy by a supernatural force which approximates the workings of Menander’s Tyche. The shift towards domestic, low-key humor is common to New Comedy and Tobit, which is also, significantly, a Hellenistic product.

I’ve always thought Jonah was funny, and I’m glad to see a scholarly argument to the effect that this perception of mine does not mark me as an incorrigible heathen.

On the other hand, I find it difficult to imagine that the original audience of Tobit felt it was supposed to laugh at anything in it. Not that I don’t smile a bit at the idea of all those guys, one after another, dutifully marching off to their deaths in Sarah’s bridal chamber, and it’s true that that dog has a disconcertingly well-developed personality. Maybe the ancients smiled at those things, too. But the whole thing is paced so much like a thriller that any breaks for laughter or classification of major characters as “ridiculous” would throw it off badly.