10 - Humour and danger in Herodotus

Summary

As Alan Griffiths has commented, 'humour is altogether a funny business'. What one culture finds funny, another might well find appalling; humour in every culture, however, blends a tacit recognition of conventional, expected standards of behaviour and narrative logic, coupled with a transient, unexpected (and sometimes illicit) pleasure at their momentary transgression. It is safe to say that Herodotus, the father of history, knows how to tell a good story, and his stories frequently strike the suggestible reader as funny. I will make several claims here: first, that humour is one aspect of Herodotus' text that makes credible his assertion that the logoi he tells are not his own invention; moreover, that the humour of the Histories is tied closely to the theme of transgressive violence and danger. Finally, the recurring and various connections between humour and danger in Herodotus point to one of the most fundamental assumptions of historiography: the importance but also the difficulty of ascertaining what is real in to anthrōpinon, the realm of the human.