Quintilian on Humor (II)

According to Quintilian, humor can be applied to oratory in three manners:
1. retorting or deriding other people’s arguments;
2. saying things “which have a suggestion of absurdity” (Institutio Oratoria 23) or speaking ironically;
3. cheating the hearers’ expectations, making them take words “in a different sense from what was intended” (24).

Quintilian iterates the significance of urbanitas; to him, urbanity is an indispensible quality in a successful orator. He sometimes quotes Domitius Marsus (De Urbanitate) to further strengthen his point.

There are two noteworthy aspects of Quintilian’s discussion of humor:*

1.      Humor is to him more of a rhetorical weapon for defense or attack than of a talent to delight.

2.      Quintilian humor is heavily class-conscious in that it encourages demonstration of decency, education, and social status, and in that it emphasizes the distinction between the urbane wit of the orator and the vulgar gags of the buffoon.

*Figueroa-Dorrego & Larkin-Galiñanes have these two points explicitly made near the end of the section on Quintilian:

“...Quintilian has insisted on the notion of urbanitas and on the necessary difference between the educated orator and the uncultivated lower classes also in the use of humour. […] the orator’s wit is expected to be elegant, sensible, and tactful, as opposed to the obscene, boorish tomfoolery, and “those coarse jives so common on the lips of the rabble” than turn into abuse (47). Like previous authors, Quintilian admonishes that “scurrilous or brutal jest, although they may raise a laugh, are quite unworthy of a gentleman,” because they can make the audience angry (83). And also like his predecessors, Quintilian was not interested in studying humour per se, but rather subordinated to rhetorical effectiveness and his own class-conscious conceopt of urbanistas” (45).