I should begin this review by confessing that I have never liked scholarship on humor, ancient or otherwise. For me, the pleasure of understanding why I (or anyone) laughed is far outweighed by the pleasure of the laugh itself; I would rather enjoy the living joke than admire its dissected body. Fortunately, Mary Beard is sympathetic to this position, and opens her book with a clearly articulated and measured analysis of why we should — indeed, must — care about the nature of Roman laughter. One of the primary reasons is that the Romans themselves cared. They were, as it turns out, a very funny people, and it worried some of them. Primary among these worriers was Cicero, whose On the Orator, in Beard’s formulation, turns out to contain the closest thing we have to a systematic “theory of laughter” from antiquity — ingenious reconstructions of the lost second book of Aristotle’s Poetics notwithstanding. Another reason we should care about Roman laughter is that it is curiously resistant to interpretation: first, because it seems to exist at the nexus of a “natural”, bodily reaction — akin, as Pliny the Elder has it, to belching — and a social or cultural gesture; second, because that which provokes it sometimes seems very close to what we find funny in the modern West. In this sense, laughter masquerades as a phenomenon without a history. Beard, again, handles both of these issues with characteristic directness and aplomb, neither skirting their difficulty nor allowing them to overwhelm the book. Ultimately, this is a very sensible, readable, and useful volume, and although I might wish she had pushed her argument further in places, Beard’s delineation of what she terms the “laughterhood” of ancient Rome sheds a great deal of light on a very slippery subject.