What was the best Roman joke? And the worst? And why was it bad form to make a joke at your own expense?

Mary Beard, professor of ancient history at the University of Cambridge – and star blogger – bravely took on the challenge of discussing Roman humour at the first session of the conference of the Classical Association/Classical Association of Scotland in Glasgow this evening.

I say bravely, because her talk involved telling a number of Roman jokes, some of which were very bad indeed. (Though the rather good-natured classicists foregathered tittered gamely at most of them.)

For instance, the elder Crassus, a stern, stoical kind of a fellow, was said only to laughed only once in his life – when he saw a donkey eating thistles. That made him laugh because it reminded him of the famous ancient saying: "Thistles are like lettuce to the lips of a donkey."

Personally, I was not in stitches at that one.

Then there is what I might venture to call the worst Roman joke ever.

It comes up in Cicero; he is discussing a joke made to one Gaius Sextius, who had one eye. Gaius Sextius invites a friend to dinner, who replies, "All right then – I see you've got a place for another."

Right. Another place for an eye, apparently. Eye, place. Whatever.

Mercifully, Cicero tells us that this is not a good joke – it's the joke of a scurror (jester) and not the bon mot of a sophisticated, urbane orator such as himself.

Indeed Beard started her talk with the hilarious (no pun intended) claim that Cicero – yes that bloke long dreaded by schoolboys and with a reputation for self-serving pomposity – was the wittiest Roman ever.

Well, that's how he was regarded – his slave collected his jokes and published them in three volumes after his death.

She went on to talk about the ways in which theorists of oratory such as Cicero himself and Quintilian wrote about jokes.

Whereas we moderns tend to think about what it is that makes people laugh, the Romans were much more interested in the joker than the laugher. That is borne out by the rich Latin vocabulary concerned with the makers of jokes compared with the fairly small one relating to laughter – which is mostly confined to cognates of the verb ridere, to laugh.

There was, she said, a kind of anxiety about the joker. Laughter was seen as janus faced. The maker of a joke could easily find himself the butt of one. (This ties into that fact that it was not seen as a good thing to laugh at oneself.)

What were suitable topics for jokes? Well, apparently there was deadpan humour; derisory humour (ie laughing opponents down); and some words were just simply funny in themselves – such as, apparently, the word stomach. Baffling.

Jokes were all the better for being specific, and for being, as it were "true".

Finally, Beard talked about one of the jokes that Quintilian praises beyond all others – falling into the category of double entendre or pun.

As Beard warned, don't get your expectations up. It's not that good.

The scenario is this. It is the trial of Milo, accused of killing the infamous, wildly unpopular, colourful, controversial aristocrat Clodius (this is all late-Republican political meltdown stuff).

Cicero was defending Milo, but he himself was being interrogated by the prosecution.

The question came: What time did Clodius die?

Cicero answered: "Sero."

That, dear non Latinists, means "late"; and also "too late". The pun is, then, that Clodius died late in the day; but also he should have been got rid of ages ago.

Not so brilliant, huh? – but apparently Quintilian was all over it. It was spontaneous, applied only to Clodius, and it was true. It wasn't the joke of a scurror, a jester, it was the joke of a refined, elite orator.

Right, off to share some more jokes over a glass of wine... let's hope modern classicists are wittier than the objects of their study...