Pod Insights The Daily Stoic | Wondery+ Quintilian on How to Tell a Joke About this episode Today’s episode features a section from Michael Fontaine’s How to Tell a Joke: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Humor part of Princeton University Press's Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series. How to Tell a Joke is a modern translation and collection of Cicero and Quintilian’s timeless advice about how to use humor to win over any audience. This episode is brought to you by Blinkist, the app that gets you fifteen-minute summaries of the best nonfiction books out there. Blinkist lets you get the topline information and the most important points from the most important nonfiction books out there, whether it’s Ryan’s own The Daily Stoic, Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, and more. Go to blinkist.com/stoic, try it free for 7 days, and save 25% off your new subscription, too. This episode is brought to you by GoMacro. Go Macro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping on all orders over $50.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript 0:02 Speaker 00 Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,
0:46 Speaker 00 and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.
0:55 Speaker 00 Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another Weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. We recently brought you an excerpt from Cicero, from Princeton University Press's Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series. Well, today, we've got another excerpt from that same book. Princeton University Press was nice enough to give to us. This one is from "The Orator Quintilian." Again, this edition is translated with commentary from Michael Fontaine. Quintilian wrote this piece, the one you're going to listen to today, 150 years after Cicero. It's funny, through the distance of time, all these things kind of get pressed together.
1:36 Speaker 00 But I mean, you know, 150, this is like Abraham Lincoln versus today, right? Just to give you some perspective. But Quintilian wrote this piece 150 years after Cicero. It's very obvious how deeply influenced he was by Cicero. He talks about how humor isn't just logic, but it also comes from a sort of a primal place. It has to touch you deeply. And I think this is true. I think oftentimes, for instance, when I'll watch a comedian, like on a Netflix special or something, the joke will make perfect Perfect sense to me as I hear it. But then if I think about it later, a lot of the underpinnings of the joke don't work. Like, it's not actually true.
2:18 Speaker 00 Like, if you were to repeat it in serious conversation as if it was a real observation, it would fall preposterously apart. It's the mood, it's the experience, the emotion, the world that the speaker has sucked you in that allows this joke to work. When you hear these speakers talk about the power of oratory, they understand there's a sleight of hand, even a bit of manipulation here. And actually, one of Cicero's knocks against Cato is that he wasn't an effective enough speaker. Rutilius Rufus, who we talk about in Lives of the Stoic, he doesn't do a great job defending himself when he's brought up on these false charges. So the Stoics understood and had to understand that speaking was its own art form. It's not just that the message is true or correct, but how do you deliver it?
3:03 Speaker 00 And in fact, humor is a really important way to draw in an audience, to connect with the audience. If you're serious all the time, you lose people. And I have to think about this, obviously, even with Daily Stoic. It's why I try to be funny with the guests that we have on. It's why I try to talk to different people. It's why I've loved having comedians like Pete Holmes on the podcast. Humor is an important part of life. It makes life worth living. Chrysippus, as we talked about last time, one of the early Stoics, dies of laughter. To me, I can't think of a better way to go out. Well, in this essay, Quintilian talks about the different types of humor. He says that there are six different types. I won't spoil it. I think you're going to enjoy this little excerpt.
3:45 Speaker 00 And of course, if you haven't checked out the Princeton University Press's Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series, I do recommend it. This is not an ad. Like, I've read all these books. I've read a bunch of the editions. And I reached out to them and I said, hey, could I excerpt some selections from the audiobooks that you guys have? I think it'd be a great little addition to the podcast. I don't want this podcast to just be about Stoicism. I don't want it to just be interviewing famous people. I want to bring you little selections of ancient classical wisdom, just like the series says, that we can apply to modern life, to you, the modern listener. And so I hope you enjoy this. You can check out How to Tell a Joke, which has got selections from Cicero and Quintilian from Princeton University Press. I love the little hardcover editions.
4:30 Speaker 00 You can also get the audiobook anywhere audiobooks are sold. And check that out. I hope you enjoy this special episode.
4:40 Speaker 01 On the Art of Humor. Quintilian: The Education of the Oraitor.
4:47 Speaker 01 Why it's Hard to Go for Laughs.
4:51 Speaker 01 Yet another skill that orators should cultivate is getting the jury to laugh. Doing that breaks up their upset emotions, takes their mind off the facts, and sometimes even snaps them out of it and gives them a fresh start when they're tired or bored. That said, the two greatest orators in history, one the leading light of Greek eloquence, the other of Latin, are a study in how truly hard it is. Because lots of people think that Demosthenes had no ability to do it, and Cicero none to resist it. It's impossible that Demosthenes was uninterested in it,
5:31 Speaker 01 because the very few quips he does have, which are at odds with all his other skills, clearly show it's not that he disliked jokes, they just weren't any good. Whereas people regarded our man Cicero as an excessive laugh-getter, and not only in normal life, but even in his public speeches. Personally, for what it's worth, whether it's because I'm right or because I'm swayed by my outsized enthusiasm for the man who towers over eloquence, I think he did have a certain amazing urbanity in him, because he cracked lots of jokes in his everyday discourse, and more of them than anyone else in legal debates and examining witnesses.
6:17 Speaker 01 Even the misfires he launched at Verres, he attributed to others and treated as witness testimony. So that the more hackneyed they are, the easier it is to believe that Cicero didn't come up with them, and that they were instead common coin. I wish his freedman Tiro, or whoever it was that published his three books on the topic, had been stingier about the number of quips and used a little more judgment in selecting than enthusiasm for collecting them. Then Cicero would have been less of a target for his critics, who will, as with every other area he was good at, nevertheless, even now, more easily find something to reject than to add in.
7:05 Speaker 01 Moreover, a first major problem with mastering humor is that a joke is typically untrue, often deliberately slanted, and always demeaning and never flattering. Second, people's reactions vary, since reactions in this domain are based not on logic but on some primal emotion. You see, I don't think anyone's really explained, though many have tried where laughter comes from, since it can be provoked not just by some action or word, but sometimes by certain kinds of physical contact too. Moreover, there's no one thing that arouses it.
7:47 Speaker 01 It's not just clever or cute remarks and actions that get laughed at. Stupid, angry, or frightened ones do too. And that explains why humor is risky, since wit is so close to twit. You see, as Cicero says, laughter has its home in some ugliness and disgrace. And it's called urbanity when you draw attention to it in others, but when it boomerangs back at the speaker, it's called stupidity. What's more, laughter seems like a minor thing, something that any stand-up comedian, street performer, or idiot can get.
8:29 Speaker 01 Nevertheless, it does have a certain overpowering and conquering force, where all resistance is futile. It oftentimes erupts from us even against our will, not only squeezing a confession from the face and voice, but even rocking the whole body forcefully. As I said, though, it can change the course of the most serious matters, since it zaps anger and animosity with great frequency.
8:59 Speaker 01 The case of those teenagers in Tarentum proves it. At a dinner party, they'd said a lot of really nasty things about King Pyrrhus. When they were brought in to explain themselves, and since there was no denying or defending it, they escaped with a laugh and a well-timed joke. One of them quipped, "Nah, man, if we hadn't run out of booze, we would have killed you." And that witticism melted away all the hard feelings over the charge. Whatever humor is, though I won't quite say there's no art to it whatsoever, since it does entail some structure, and since Greek and Latin authors alike have composed
9:42 Speaker 01 rules for it, I will still state for the record that it is primarily a product of, one, genetics, and, two, the right opportunity.
9:53 Speaker 00 Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.
10:02 Speaker 01 One, moreover, genetics don't merely determine whether a person is wittier and quicker at coming up with ideas, because teaching really could improve that. No, some people just intrinsically have a special look about them: the way they move, their face, such that the same jokes don't seem as funny when someone else tells them. Two, the right opportunity, though, which is so powerful that it often helps not only uneducated people but even hillbillies to crack jokes, hinges on both situations and also on what a prior speaker says, because every quip is much more fun as a comeback than a provocation.
10:46 Speaker 01 Another thing that makes humor hard is that there are no practice lessons for it, no teachers. The upshot is that many people are great at sick burns at parties and in conversation, because everyday life experience lets us get better at it. But wittiness in public speaking is rare, and it borrows from those routines instead of having its own set of rules. Still, nothing's ever stopped anyone from creating instructional materials suitable for it, such as mock debates that would be genuinely funny, or special prompts to drill students in it. It's the opposite, actually.
11:29 Speaker 01 If we systematized them a bit, or added a little seriousness to the mix, one thing that could be really useful are those cut-downs, the diaccertics that we used to take turns exchanging on Anything Goes days. At the moment, they're just a one-upping game for students having fun. Six different kinds of humour. At any rate, we generally use a number of different names for the same thing, humour, and if we look at them separately, each one will reveal its own special properties. One. One is urbanity, which in my experience means speech,
12:11 Speaker 01 whose words, sounds, and usage lead with an unmistakable "city" flavour, and a quiet sophistication picked up from being around educated people. Its opposite is countrified speech. Two. Charming obviously means something said with a certain grace and charm. Three. We only say salty or zest-y in ordinary speech of something funny. It's not necessarily funny by nature, though anything salty should also be funny too. I say this because... Three A. Cicero says that everything that's salty is a hallmark of Attic Greek writers,
12:55 Speaker 01 and he doesn't mean that they're maximally geared toward laughter. And, three B. Catulus, when he says "there's not a grain of salt in her body", doesn't mean there's nothing funny in her body. Hence, salty must mean not bland. It's like a basic flavour enhancer for our speech, one our minds take in imperceptibly the way our taste buds do, and it keeps speech from getting boring. You see, just as real salt enhances our enjoyment of food when it's given a good sprinkling, without overdoing it though, so too do jokes possess a certain something that makes us thirsty to listen.
13:40 Speaker 01 Witty is another one that I don't think means just funny. If it did, Horace wouldn't say that nature granted Virgil a witty style of poetry in the ecclogs. In my view, the word rather denotes charm and a certain polished elegance. Hence, in his letters, Cicero quotes Brutus. "Yes, sir, those are the cadences of a wit, of a man gaily prancing in." And that accords with Horace's line, "Prancing witty, that's Virgil for you." Five, by contrast, we take a joke to be the opposite of serious.
14:23 Speaker 01 You see, making up stories, scaring people, and making promises are all jokes at times. Six, being a jerk is obviously derived from "dicere," to say, which is the common element in every kind of humor, though properly it means to sneer. That's why people say Demosthenes was urbane, but they don't say he was a jerk.
14:49 Speaker 00 Thanks so much for listening. If you could leave a review for the podcast, we'd really appreciate it. The reviews make a difference, and of course, every nice review from a nice person helps balance out the crazy people who get triggered and angry anytime we say something they disagree with. So if you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us, and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.
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