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Twice in Ovid's Fasti the god Priapus attempts to rape a sleeping female deity. Both times he is thwarted at the last possible minute by the braying of an ass. The woman wakes and Priapus's hopes are dashed.1 The first rape appears in Book 1 and the victim is the nymph Lotis (1.391-440); the second occurs in Book 6 with the goddess Vesta as Priapus's target (6.31948). Oddly, Ovid includes humorous elements in both scenes: the Priapus and Loris episode ends with laughter from the assembled crowd, while the Priapus and Vesta story is explicitly introduced as funny. Priapus's second attack, on Vesta, however, is very different from the earlier one: while introduced as a joke, this attempted rape ends not with laughter but with the sight of Priapus fleeing in terror from the attacking crowd. In this paper, I begin from an obvious question, one prompted by Ovid's "light" presentation of such repulsive material: what's so funny about attempted rape? For an approach, I turn to joking discourse.2
Joking discourse uses that well-known rhetorical triangle of Teller,
Butt, and Audience in order to explore both the invention of funniness and the reception of joking. A focus on the invention of funniness in these two scenes naturally directs attention to the roles that the narrator and, ultimately, Ovid himself play. The narrator, for example, offers these rapes as humorous tales and, in so doing, shows us, Audience, the comic in both Priapus and his victims.3 Jokes are not all that the narrator offers here, however. I also argue that, in both scenes, the narrator uses the techniques of pornographic representation in his showing and his telling. This narrative strategy allows the reader, if willing, to complete what the author only suggests, namely the rape of a sleeping woman offered as the object of that pornographic representation-just as a reader can laugh at a joke, that is, complete the exchange offered by Teller.
Both pornography and jokes have been the focus of a great deal of interest from scholars, especially feminist ones, yet so far as I know, the two topics are rarely connected; they overlap in several areas, however. For example, as I just noted, reception plays an essential role in both. More importantly,...