ROME

THE ROMAN EMPIRE suffered a marked decline in humour in the two centuries before its western half fell apart, according to new research.

“Normally, historians and archaeologists focus on wars, economics and pottery when studying this subject, but we have decided to examine the absence of humour, wherever we can detect it,” says Dr Monty Goodie, a researcher based in the Gallows University, based in Funibone, California.

“Our detailed investigations have shown that Romans became more serious during what’s often called the crisis of the third century, and they do not appear to have recovered from this in the period that came to an end in 476 with the fall of the western empire. People just stopped laughing. Even the graffiti is noticeably more serious and polarized. It became a witless place, we think, where the only thing that a society can rely on to bind it together – humour – was almost universally absent. I’m sure small groups and individuals told jokes and humourous stories to one another but the society as a whole seemed to have become just too serious for its own good. Humour is a release valve. A society that cannot laugh at itself is doomed to explode from the pressure build-up. Curiously, in the Eastern Roman Empire, centred on Constantinople, humour was still alive. And it lasted till 1453. But that empire based on the city of Rome, it appears to have died po-faced, having forotten how to laugh.”