The Daily Stoic - Quintilian on How to Tell a Joke

Episode Date: May 2, 2021

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.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music download the app today Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoke each weekday We bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stokes Something to help you live up to those four Stoke 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, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree's podcast business wars.

And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another weekend episode of the Daily Stoke 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 Order Quintillion. Again, this edition is translated with commentary from Michael Fontaine. Quintillion wrote this piece, the one you're going to listen to today, 150 years after Cicero. It's funny, it's the distance of time, all these things kind of get pressed together, but I mean, you know, 150, this is like Abraham Lincoln versus today, right? Just to give you some perspective. But Quintillion 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 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. It's not actually true. 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, 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 slight of hand, even a bit of manipulation here. And actually one of Cicero's nox against Cato is that he wasn't an effective enough speaker Rutilius Rufus who we talk about in lives of the Stoke He doesn't do a great job defending himself when he's brought up on these false charges

So the Stokes understood and had to understand that that speaking was its own art form It's it's not just that the message is true or correct, but how do you deliver it? 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 Stoke,

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. Crescipis, as we talked about last time, one of the early stokes, dies of laughter. To me, I can't think of a better way to go out. Well, in this essay, Quintillion talks about the different types of humor. He says that there's six different types. I won't spoil it. I think you're going to enjoy this little excerpt. And of course, if you haven't checked out the Princeton University Presses Ancient Wisdom for Modern Reader Series, I do recommend

that 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 Quintillian from Princeton University Press. I love the little hardcover editions,

but you can also get the audio book, anywhere audio books are sold, and check that out. I hope you enjoy this special episode. On the art of humor, Quintillian, the education of the orator. Why it's hard to go for love. Yet another skill that orator's should cultivate is getting the jury to love. 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 errators in history won 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, 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-gitter, and not only a 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 erbanity 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. Even the misfires he launched at Varys, 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. More over 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. 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 humour 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. 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. 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 humour 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 rules for it, I will still state for the record that it is primarily a product of one, genetics, and two, the right opportunity. We've got a quick message from one of our sponsors here, and then we'll get right back to the

show. Stay tuned. Hey there listeners! While we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. to the show, stay tuned. sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduke Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Kodopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discussed their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges, and how to lead through uncertainty.

So if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wonder yet. One, more over, 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. 2. 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. Another thing that makes humour 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 every day life experience lets us get better at it, but witness 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 material 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. If we systematised them a bit or added a little seriousness to the mix, one thing that could be really useful are those cut downs, the diacertics that we used to take turns exchanging on anything goes-days. At the moment they're just a one-uping 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 is urbanity, which in my experience means speech, 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 contrafied speech. 2. Charming Obviously means something said with a certain grace and charm. 3. We only say salty or zesty 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, 3A, Cicero says that everything that salty is a whole mark of attic Greek writers, and he doesn't mean that they're maximally geared toward laughter. And three be catalysts, 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. Whitty is another one that I don't think means just funny. If it did, Horace wouldn't say that nature granted Virgilet, a Whitty style of poetry in the Eclogs. 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 galey prancing in. And that accords with Horace's line, prancing witty, that's virgial for you. Five, by contrast we take a joke to be the opposite of Sirius. You see, making up stories, scaring people and making promises are all jokes at times. 6. Being a jerk is obviously derived from D-Carré to say, which is the common element in every kind of humour, though properly it means to sneer. That's why people say de Mostanese was her bane,

but they don't say he was a jerk. 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. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.