Joke and Wordplay

This paper focuses on jokes and wordplays that are based on ambiguity in ancient literary sources. It begins with a simplified definition of ambiguity and illustrates its significance for humour. Next, the ancient theories of humour are presented, particularly the sources of laughter as elicited by Quintilian and Cicero. Aristotle’s categorisation of ambiguity will be helpful in analysing the different kinds of jokes they are the source of. This will lead into a catalogue of ambiguous jokes to showcase the range of this form. As expected, this begins with the comic poets Aristophanes and Plautus. I present also a few jokes from the Philogelos, a joke collection from approximately the fourth century AD, and conclude with jokes from Cicero and Augustus, as transmitted by Macrobius in his Saturnalia. As Quintilian (and Cicero in some sense) provides in his rhetorical handbook a rather – nomen omen – ambiguous evaluation of the jokes based on ambiguity I attempt to show a possible explanation of this apparent critique.