What does this mean?Pros & Cons
Pros
In the brilliant penultimate chapter she meditates on an ancient compendium of jokes, the philogelos. Admittedly, i'm a cultural relativist, but still i think that some of the examples she cites are still funny--funnier than she thinks.
Mary beard's book shows that romans applied humor more broadly than greeks. The romans found many things that we find humorous today, humorous in the olden times. Beard is a well-regarded historian with a long beard.
Highlights
Quality
Beard rightly points out that romans and greeks had a different view of humor with the romans applying humor more broadly in their culture
“i have become increasingly convinced that the reason we can laugh along with the ancient romans is because it is from them tha... Read More
There are those who say for instance that the famous mosaic of a chained dog at the house of the tragic poet with the menacing ... Read More
The book is divided into two parts with the first part being a rather dense analysis of laughter in ancient greece and rome and... Read More
Overview
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ancient, roman, two, funny and great. - Our engine has profiled the reviewer patterns and has determined that there is minimal deception involved.
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- Our engine has discovered that over 80% high quality reviews are present.
- This product had a total of 104 reviews as of our last analysis date on Mar 3 2023.
Helpful InsightsBETA
Posted by a reviewer on Amazon
I am a huge mary beard fan in general and i only bought this book because she wrote it
Posted by a reviewer on Amazon
If you do like her style though this book is amazingly critical and skeptical of traditional scholarship and casts really interesting doubt on conventional wisdom
Posted by a reviewer on Amazon
She somehow managed to write a book about humor that far from killing jokes by analyzing them somehow manages to be really funny in and of itself in many places
Posted by a reviewer on Amazon
So unexpected a subject so obvious in retrospect
Posted by a reviewer on Amazon
Normally dissecting what makes us laugh is as distant from humor as dissecting a human body is from cuddling
Posted by a reviewer on Amazon
All the parts of a joke can be labelled and parsed or the nerves can be traced to their endings in the skin but the result merely indicate a way to look at humor or affection thus removing you to a point distant from the reality of either state
Posted by a reviewer on Amazon
Not the 1st book from mary beard i have read
Posted by a reviewer on Amazon
By this she means that the romans commoditized the joke i
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