Humour in Homer

 

    Humour in Homer

When you’re writing stories about rape and pillage, war and blood-soaked ground, swords, arrows and spears penetrating bodies at every angle, heads rolling in the dust, shipwrecks and drowning, mass murder and executions, as well as humans being devoured by monsters, it’s hard to find the humour in life or much to laugh about. But Homer does inject some semblance of humour into his stories and uses certain laughable people, gods or events to entertain his audience and to introduce a degree of levity to lighten the mood at times. His humour is certainly never raucous and at times even falls outside the limits of what modern readers might deem funny. But the author’s attempts at humour do provide comic relief from the rather serious themes of both the Iliad and the Odyssey.

The humour that we find in the Iliad tends to be more mocking and satirical and is usually the result of the flawed actions of mortals and especially immortals. As we noted, Homer injects a sense of levity in order to counteract the great and overwhelming tragedy that is at the very heart of his narrative. His is a story of wrath and revenge set on a stage of bloody and awful warfare and hence, even the tiniest hint of humour stands out as quite noticeable. The humour of the Odyssey is clever because Odysseus is clever and this humour is mostly character-driven. It generally comes as a result of the hero’s wit and his interactions with his fellow humans as well as immortals. Homer also uses a certain amount of irony, for example when the audience is aware of what is happening but the characters are not.

The humour in the Iliad typically revolves around the activities of the gods, with one noticeable exception, and that is the incident involving Thersites. Homer’s listeners would have been highly amused by his description of this rabble-rouser.

But Thersites alone, being unbridled of tongue, began to scold them and complain aloud. His mind was full of curses and he rallied at the leaders incessantly and inconsiderately without decorum, anything to get a laugh from the Argives. He was the ugliest man who had come to Ilium and was bandy-legged and lame in one foot. His shoulders were arched over and his chest was sunken and at the top of him he carried a pointed head covered with fuzzy wool-like hair.

The audience would have laughed aloud at how Odysseus spoke to him and how he laid a beating on him to punish him for his outrageous behaviour.

I will take you and strip you of your clothing, your cloak and tunic and the undergarments that hide your privates. I will send you away from the assembly to the swift ships, struck with terror and weeping, having first beaten you soundly. Thus he spoke and he struck his back and shoulders with his sceptre and Thersites shed great tears. A bloody bruise welled up on his back from the blows of the sceptre and being greatly frightened, he sat down. Being in intense pain and feeling rather useless, he wiped away his tears and though they were grieved, the soldiers all laughed at him.

            The other thing that they would have found funny was how King Agamemnon’s plan backfired on him. In an attempt to instil great pride and a renewed fighting spirit in his troops, he suggested that they should just give up trying to conquer Troy after ten years of struggle and make their way back home. His thinking was that the proud warriors would object strongly to this suggestion and rush to arm themselves for battle. Instead, they concluded that his idea was a good one and hurried to the ships in a frenzy so that they could leave. It took the intervention of Odysseus to save the day for the bewildered Agamemnon.

            But as stated, most of the humour in the first epic is centered on the actions of the divine. At a banquet on Mount Olympus, Hephaestus attempted to console his mother and told the story of how, when he was trying to help his mother once before, Zeus had grabbed him by the foot and had flung him from the royal threshold. The lame Hephaestus was always playing the buffoon and his actions usually resulted in laughter.

For at another time when I was trying to help you, he grabbed me by the foot and flung me forth from the royal threshold. I fell all day long and like the setting sun I landed in Lemnos, where with little life left in me the men of Sintia took me in and cared for me. Thus he spoke and the white-armed goddess Hera smiled and having done so, received into her hands the goblet from her child. He poured out sweet nectar from the bowl for all the other gods, starting from the right hand side. The blessed gods erupted in inextinguishable laughter when they saw Hephaestus bustling around the house serving them.

            Another humorous incident occurs in Book XIV of the Iliad when Hera seduces Zeus and makes him fall into a deep sleep so that he cannot interfere in the battle being waged below. She talked Aphrodite into giving up her magical girdle of love and affection and convinced Sleep to assist her in her task. She then sweet-talked Zeus and in his arousal, he followed her into a private bedchamber where they had sex. Fully satisfied by an afternoon of delight, the king of the gods fell asleep and missed the battle. Homer’s audience would not have been able to contain themselves at this story of the gods acting like humans.

            They would also have found humorous the two scenes where gods were wounded by a human in the war. Diomedes, with the help of Athena, wounded Aphrodite on the hand and she left the field of battle and went crying to her father. He also wounded Ares in the stomach with a spear and the god fled back to Olympus. Diomedes became the only warrior in the Iliad who wounded two gods in a single day and this would have struck Homer’s listeners as laughable.

            In Book XXI there is an argument and a fight between Hera and Artemis and no doubt the audience would have found it funny to hear about Hera laying a spanking on the archer goddess.

Thus she spoke and she then grabbed both the other one’s hands by the wrist with her left hand and with her right hand she took the bow and its gear from her shoulders and with these same weapons she turned around and beat her about the ears, smiling all the while as she turned this way and that and the swift arrows fell out of her quiver. Then tearfully the goddess flew from her just like a dove that flies into the cleft of a rock fleeing from a falcon, not destined to be captured. So did the tearful goddess flee and she left her bow behind.

            With the following notable exception, the humour in the Odyssey tended to centre on the actions of men rather than of gods. Demodocus the bard treated his audience to one of the most laughable happenings in either epic. He told the story of how Hephaestus laid a trap for his unfaithful wife Aphrodite and how he caught and entangled her and her lover Ares in their love nest. The gods gathered and made fun of the couple and mere mortals would have found the event quite amusing.

Thus he spoke and all the gods gathered at the house with the bronze floor and Poseidon the earth-mover came and the luck-bringer Hermes and the lord Apollo, the archer. The goddesses stayed in their own homes, all ashamed, but the gods who are the granters of all things, stood in the doorway. Unquenchable laughter arose among the gods when they saw the workings of the wise Hephaestus and spoke as follows when they looked at one another. “Bad deeds do not thrive and the slow will catch the fast, even as now the slow Hephaestus has caught Ares who is the swiftest of all the gods who hold Olympus. Lame though he might be, he has caught him and now Ares owes the fine imposed on one who is caught in adultery.”

            Trickery and deceit were viewed as humorous and of course the Odyssey is filled with both. Penelope’s wit is seen as a source of amusement and the audience would have reveled in her ability to outwit the suitors. Her trick with weaving and unraveling the burial shroud demonstrated the playful side of her character. This naughty side of her was also shown when she faked a growing interest in remarrying and managed in doing so, to elicit a mass of bride gifts from the suitors. It was her way of replenishing her husband’s treasury to compensate for what her admirers were consuming.

            The beggar’s disguise that Odysseus assumed would have been seen as humorous and the audience would have appreciated the irony in many of the events that happened and the words that were spoken while he was so concealed. His treatment by the suitors, even to the extent of having someone throw a footstool at him, his fight with his fellow beggar Irus, and the whole incident with the bow and arrow would have delighted the listeners, especially when Odysseus laughed at Zeus thundering when he strung the bow. They would also have deemed funny the irony in having the suitor Ctesippus, he who threw the footstool, killed by an arrow to the neck shot by the lowly cowherd Philoetius, who caps off the event by musing that the weak are indeed most powerful.

            In his beggar disguise, Odysseus told a story about himself to Eumaeus and in a humorous way, revealed that he was not inspired by the Muse, but by some other source. The listeners would have seen the irony in his comments, because they knew his true identity. Muse inspired stories had to be true because they were divine in origin, but wine inspired ones could be concocted and false.

Listen to me now Eumaeus and all you other comrades for I want to tell you a story. The crazy wine encourages me to speak, wine that causes you to sing and laugh and get up and dance and to say things that were better left unspoken. But now I want to speak out and to hide nothing.

            The suitors did a tremendous amount of laughing while they helped themselves to the belongings of their host and hostess. All of this laughter would have been seen as ironic by Homer’s listeners because they were fully aware of the fate that was in store for the suitors.

Thus spoke Telemachus but Pallas Athena sent uncontrollable laughter onto all the suitors and made them crazy in their minds. Their jaws wagged with mirth-provoking laughter and they were besprinkled with blood as they ate the meat and their eyes were full of tears and their spirits predicted wailing.

So he spoke and they all laughed greatly at him.

But all the suitors glanced at one another and looked to rouse up Telemachus by laughing at his guests.

In the middle of all their laughter, they had prepared their meal which was suitable to all their desires for they had slain many animals.

            In his essay The Humour of Homer, the famed author Samuel Butler (1835-1902) gives us several examples of the witty and funny things that the gods say and do in the Iliad and then he goes on to say,

“The above extracts must suffice as examples of the kind of divine comedy in which Homer brings the gods and goddesses upon the scene.  Among mortals the humour, what there is of it, is confined mainly to the grim taunts which the heroes fling at one another when they are fighting, and more especially to crowing over a fallen foe.”

As far as the Odyssey is concerned, Butler says this,

“And now let us turn to the Odyssey, a work which I myself think of as the Iliad’s better half or wife.  Here we have a poem of more varied interest, instinct with not less genius, and on the whole I should say, if less robust, nevertheless of still greater fascination—one, moreover, the irony of which is pointed neither at gods nor woman, but with one single and perhaps intercalated exception, at man.  Gods and women may sometimes do wrong things, but, except as regards the intrigue between Mars and Venus just referred to, they are never laughed at.”

Later Butler notes that there are several errors in the Odyssey. The most humorous thing about his essay is that he uses the presence of these supposed errors as proof that the Odyssey was written by a woman and not by Homer. In fact, he suggests that the author writes herself into the narrative in the person of the Phaeacian Princess Nausicaa.

“Another very material point of difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey lies in the fact that the Homer of the Iliad always knows what he is talking about, while the supposed Homer of the Odyssey often makes mistakes that betray an almost incredible ignorance of detail.”

            Samuel Butler and his theory about authorship notwithstanding, there is indeed humour to be found in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Much of the humour can be found in the gods being caught in the act of being more mortal than immortal, and this would have amused Homer’s listeners. Some of the humour is centered on the actions of people, but the laughs do not come as a result of slapstick or pratfalls. Usually the laughter comes about from the irony involved in the event itself or in the speech associated with the event. An audience in the know is an audience aglow. The fact remains that the essential subject matter of the two epics is dark in nature and they are both stories of dreadful events, sorrowful anguish and powerful emotions. They dig deep for a strong psychological effect on their listeners and in contrast, the author provides a glimpse of humour for comedic relief for his audience.