| For centuries, critical scholarship on Juvenal has tended to focus on the didactic, angry, or dark elements of the Satires. Even recent critics, whose readings do much to illuminate the poet's entertaining dramatic and rhetorical tropes, are often reluctant to admit that Juvenal's text might inspire more than the occasional subdued titter. This study rejects the notion that gravity and wit are mutually exclusive modes of discourse and analyzes the poet's text with a view toward "black comedy". Using Platonic and Aristotelian notions of laughter along with modern humor theories, I construct a model of humor appreciation in Juvenal that seeks to explain the appeal of the poet's verse in terms of the reader's emotional and libidinal response. Relying primarily upon the ancient philosophers and upon the Freudian analysis of wit, I propose two distinct categories of laughter in Juvenal: the first, a laughter that is private, internally directed, and pleasure-driven and a second category that is externally directed and driven by a hostile or aggressive aim. Having defined the fundamental appeal of Juvenalian humor, I proceed to my textual analysis with critical readings of passages drawn primarily from the second, sixth, eighth, ninth, and fifteenth satires. The readings identify and analyze the most common methods and techniques of the poet's humor, and conclude that Juvenal's narrative style conforms to many modern comedic practices. The chapters of this work are divided topically. In the first chapter, I analyze the manner in which Juvenal combines eroticism and shock humor, and thus creates tension between grotesque fantasy and horror. In the second chapter, I discuss the poet's use of aggression or hostility as a comic trope, and I identify various methods that the poet employs to distance the reader from the hostility of the text. In the final chapter, I discuss the poet's use of voyeurism and seek to discover the ways in which he implicates the reader in socially taboo themes and "forbidden" scenes. The final chapter brings together the two categories of laughter that were identified in the Introduction, erotic and aggressive, and demonstrates a close association between them. |
