Mary Beard knows a great deal about the literature of the ancient Romans, but not very much about humor and laughter. She has written a learned tome for the classicists, appropriately published under The Joan Palevsky Imprint in Classical Literature. There is much in her new book for those already well acquainted with Catullus and Cicero, Plautus and Plutarch, Terence and Tiberius, but, sadly, the number of such potential readers is today greatly diminished, even among the educated. If the book were aimed at specialists, that would be the end of it, but it is being marketed as accessible to the general reader, which it is not, whatever her claque may claim in the British newspapers. The use of the demotic term “cracking up” in the title indicates this attempt to widen the readership.

Professor Beard’s book is deficient because she knows little about the humor of cultures other than those of Rome and Greece and not even that much about the humor of the English-speaking world of our own times. Furthermore, she is quite unaware of the very extensive empirical studies of humor, laughter, and smiles carried out during the last forty years. The blurb on the jacket says that the book “will appeal to psychologists and anthropologists as well as classicists.” It won’t. I looked in vain for references to the work of the leading contemporary psychologists of humor, such as Rod Martin or Willibald Ruch, or of anthropologists, such as Elliott Oring or the University