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Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power,and Transgression in Roman VisualCulture, 100 B.C.A.D. 250By John R. Clarke. Pp. xi + 322, b&w figs. 119, color pls. 24. University ofCalifornia Press, Berkeley 2008. $55. ISBN 978-0-520-23733-9 (cloth).

Clarkes study of humor in Roman visualrepresentation descends in a clear intellec-

tual lineage from his earlier studies, Looking

at Lovemaking(Berkeley 1998),Art in the Livesof Ordinary Romans (Berkeley 2003), and Ro-

man Sex(New York 2003). The current book

pursues some favorite Clarkeian themes

sexual images, paintings from taverns, andrepresentations of pygmies, among other

thingsdiscussed from other points of view

in these earlier works. In this case, he examines

what Romans (of whatever sex or social status)laughed at and the purpose or result of evok-

ing such laughter. The topic is treacherous, ashumor and laughter are intensely culturally

specific and do not travel well. Yet Clarkeconsistently makes a good fist of explaining

what is funny about this or that image, from

a Roman point of view, and in accounting for

why the resulting laughter matters.Clarke begins by probing the (vast) modern

theoretical apparatus on laughter and humor.

He selects two approaches as particularly

suited to his project: W.H. Martineaus theoryof laughter as a device for consolidating and

delineating social groupings, and Mikhail

Bakhtins idea of the carnivalesque, where

laughter is evoked by inversions of normalsocial and moral hierarchies. Thus, the laughter

that Clarke investigatesthe kind to which

his chosen theoretical apparatus gives him

accessis of a specifically social type, gettingits traction on matters of status, group identity,

and social incongruity. Not all laughter fits

this profile: puns, for example, do not typi-

cally leverage the social to arouse laughter orgroans. But Clarkes apparatus covers a lot

of ground and provides him a solid basis foranalyzing and explicating the humorous di-

mension (sometimes unsuspected) of a wide

variety of Roman images. It also requires him

to undertake a great deal of cultural spade-work. He must identify and explicate the social

structures, practices, norms, beliefs, and ex-

pectationswhich themselves vary from one

social group to another and over timethatprovide the frameworks and preconditions for

this kind of laughter.

The books main exposition falls into three

parts, each containing several chapters. Part

1, Visual Humor, in some ways providesthe books master trope, for it introduces the

principal situationsfurther explored in later

sectionsin which Roman visual imageryevokes laughter. Inversions of accepted values

get their first mise-en-scne with a comparison

of comic masks and ancestral portraiture,

which may have coexisted in the decorationof the atrium of the House of the Theatrical

Pictures in Pompeii. Callers to this house may

have perceived a laughable ethical disjunc-

tion in such juxtaposed faces, which codedand symbolized divergent values. (I confess

to having found this discussion somewhat

incoherent.)Viewers expectations are also humorously

overturned when, on entering a house, they are

confronted with painted or mosaic guard dogs

in the vestibule, or a trompe loeil unswept

floor mosaic in a dining room. The latter mayprovide a humorous prediction of the mess to

come or perhaps serve as a kind of game board

for the dinner guests, as Clarke brilliantly sug-gests (e.g., a guest might put the real mussel

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