Atellan Farce

Based on Wikipedia: Atellan Farce

The Original Saturday Night Live Was Roman

Picture this: It's ancient Rome, sometime around 300 BC. You've spent the day at the market, haggling over grain prices and dodging the occasional runaway cart. Now it's a festival day, and you're settling in to watch a short, raucous performance. Actors in grotesque masks stumble onto a simple stage. There's no script. The performers are making it up as they go, riffing on stock characters that everyone in the audience knows by heart. One plays a gluttonous idiot. Another is a lecherous old man who keeps getting tricked by his own wife. The jokes are crude, the physical comedy is broad, and the whole thing is over in twenty minutes.

You've just watched an Atellan Farce.

These improvised masked comedies dominated Roman popular entertainment for over five hundred years. They were the sketch comedy of the ancient world—short, punchy, and absolutely vulgar. And their influence didn't end when Rome fell. The stock characters they created would echo through the centuries, eventually inspiring the masked comedies of Renaissance Italy and, arguably, the slapstick traditions we still enjoy today.

Where Did These Farces Come From?

The name gives us our first clue. Most historians believe "Atellan" derives from Atella, a small town in the region of Campania, in what is now southern Italy. The people who lived there weren't Romans—they were Oscans, an Italic people with their own language and cultural traditions.

The Oscans originally performed these farces in their own tongue. When Rome absorbed Oscan territory and culture around 391 BC, the farces came along for the ride. The Romans loved them. They started performing the plays in their own theaters, though they kept some Oscan flavor. In later Roman versions, the ridiculous characters—the fools and gluttons—still spoke their lines in Oscan, while the more respectable characters spoke Latin. It was a kind of linguistic joke, using the "foreign" language to mark someone as laughably foolish.

This makes a certain sense when you think about it. Languages often carry social connotations. In early Hollywood films, villains frequently had vaguely European accents. British accents in American media often signal either intelligence or snobbery. The Romans were doing something similar—using Oscan as a marker for buffoonery.

The Art of Making It Up

Here's what made Atellan Farce distinctive: nothing was written down. At least, not originally.

The performers would decide on the basic situation and characters just before going on stage, then improvise everything else. The dialogue, the jokes, the physical business—all created in the moment. This is why we know so frustratingly little about what the original performances actually looked like. You can't study a text that never existed.

What we do have are images painted on ancient vases, showing masked figures in exaggerated poses. We have the titles of about 115 plays, recorded centuries later when writers finally started scripting versions of these popular entertainments. And we have roughly 400 lines of fragmentary text—scraps and quotations preserved in other works.

From this scanty evidence, scholars have pieced together that the plays ran somewhere between fifteen and twenty-eight minutes. The plots were simple to the point of absurdity: someone eats too much, someone gets drunk, someone steals something and gets caught. The humor was physical and crude, full of puns, pratfalls, and what one ancient source delicately called "vulgar riddles."

The surviving titles give a sense of the everyday subject matter: "The Farmer," "The She-goat," "The Woodpile," "The Vine-Gatherers." These weren't sophisticated comedies of manners. They were entertainment for festival days and market crowds—people who wanted to laugh hard and then go about their business.

Meet the Masks

The heart of Atellan Farce was its stock characters. Like the character types in a modern sitcom or sketch show, audiences knew exactly what to expect from each one the moment they appeared on stage. The masks made identification instant. You didn't need character development or backstory. The mask told you everything.

Maccus was the star of the show—literally. He appears more often than any other character in the surviving play titles. Picture a hunchback with a hooked nose, the village idiot, the fool who stumbles into trouble. His name probably comes from either the Greek word for "stupid" or a Greek prefix meaning "greedy." Maybe both applied. One surviving play is called "Maccus the Maid"—apparently a farce about comic confusion involving twins or mistaken identity. Another is simply titled "The Fool."

Buccus was the glutton. The name likely comes from the Latin word for "cheek" or "mouth," and the character lived up to it—a fat-cheeked braggart, a country bumpkin who ate too much and talked even more. Think of him as the original buffoon (and yes, that word is related).

Pappus was the old man, and here the etymology is clear: the Greek word "pappos" means grandfather. Poor Pappus was easy to deceive, constantly being tricked by his daughter or his wife or really anyone clever enough to try. He appears in five surviving play titles, making him the second most popular character after Maccus. Interestingly, Pappus is the only character whose name has Oscan origins rather than Greek or Latin ones—a hint that this character type might be one of the oldest in the repertoire.

Dossennus was the hunchback intellectual—a pompous doctor or a "crafty cheat." The name probably derives from "dorsum," the Latin word for "back," referring to his hunched posture. He was the smart one, or at least he thought he was.

Manducus is more mysterious. The name means "the chewer" in Latin, which suggests someone with an aggressive jaw or an appetite for biting. Some scholars think Manducus might not have been a separate character at all—perhaps just a description of Dossennus, or a mask type that overlapped with another role. The character doesn't appear in any surviving play titles, which adds to the mystery.

Centunculus was the comic slave, the crafty servant figure who would become ubiquitous in later Roman comedy and eventually in comedies worldwide. If you've ever watched a sitcom where the wisecracking employee outsmarts the clueless boss, you've seen Centunculus's descendants.

The Players Were Amateurs (And That Mattered)

Here's something surprising: the performers in Atellan Farce weren't professional actors. They were the sons of Roman citizens—specifically, citizens whose social standing was high enough that they could serve in the army. Professional actors, in Roman society, occupied a much lower rung. They were often slaves or freedmen, people without the rights of full citizenship.

But Atellan performers? They kept their civic status. Performing in these farces carried no social stigma. This was citizen entertainment performed by citizens, which may explain part of its enduring popularity. The farces weren't something that happened to respectable Romans; they were something respectable Romans did.

All the roles were played by men, including the female characters. The masks made this easier—gender was indicated by the mask type, not by the performer's actual appearance. The staging was minimal, the costumes simple. These weren't elaborate productions. They were quick, portable entertainments that could be performed almost anywhere a crowd gathered.

From Improvisation to Literature

For centuries, Atellan Farce remained an oral tradition. Then, in the first century BC, something changed. Writers began scripting these performances, turning improvised sketches into written verse.

The two names that survive are Lucius Pomponius and Quintus Novius. Pomponius, from Bologna, is sometimes called the "founder" of literary Atellan Farce—not because he invented the form, but because he was apparently the first to write it down systematically. His plays included titles like "Maccus the Soldier" and "Bucco Adoptatus." Quintus Novius, writing about fifty years after the dictator Sulla's reign, contributed another fifty plays to the repertoire: "The Henhouse," "The Deaf One," "The Harvesters."

This transition from improvisation to script is fascinating to consider. What gets preserved when you write down something that was designed to be spontaneous? The plays must have lost something—the crackling energy of performers thinking on their feet, the way an improviser can respond to an audience's reactions in real time. But they gained permanence, and the ability to be performed again and again in the same form.

A writer named "Memmius" also contributed to the form, though his works were apparently so indecent that later authors like Ovid and Pliny the Younger complained about them. When Roman authors—who were not exactly prudes—find your comedy too dirty, you've achieved something remarkable.

Even the dictator Sulla tried his hand at writing Atellan Fables. Yes, that Sulla—the ruthless general who marched on Rome twice and instituted brutal proscriptions against his enemies. Apparently, he also had comedic aspirations. History does not record whether his farces were any good.

Too Popular for Their Own Good

By the first century AD, Atellan Farce had become a problem.

Not because it wasn't popular—quite the opposite. The form had become so popular that performers felt emboldened to mock powerful people. The emperor Tiberius himself was satirized in an Atellan farce, ridiculed for his sexual habits. After one particular performance, a catchphrase spread through Rome: "the old goat lapping up the doe." The Roman historian Suetonius recorded this detail, perhaps with some satisfaction. Tiberius was not a beloved emperor.

The authorities were not amused.

In 28 AD, Tiberius brought a motion before the Senate complaining about the performers' behavior. The historian Tacitus preserved his words:

They had often sought to disturb the public peace, and to bring disgrace on private families, and the old Oscan farce, once a wretched amusement for the vulgar, had become at once so indecent and popular, that it must be checked by the Senate's authority.

The Senate agreed. All Atellan performers were banished from Italy.

This is a pattern you see throughout history: popular entertainment that mocks the powerful eventually provokes a crackdown. Medieval carnival traditions, the satirical prints of 18th-century England, political comedy in authoritarian states today—power has never enjoyed being laughed at. The Atellan performers discovered this truth the hard way.

But the Form Survived

Banishment from Italy didn't kill Atellan Farce. The tradition was too deeply rooted, too entertaining, too useful as a quick crowd-pleaser. The emperor Hadrian, ruling about a century after Tiberius's crackdown, reportedly featured Atellan Farces at his banquets. The form had gone from populist entertainment to imperial amusement—or perhaps it had always been both.

And then, centuries later, something interesting happened in Italy.

The Long Shadow of the Masks

In the sixteenth century, a new form of theater emerged in Italy: the Commedia dell'arte. Like Atellan Farce, it was improvised. Like Atellan Farce, it used masks. Like Atellan Farce, it featured instantly recognizable stock characters that audiences loved to see in new situations.

The parallels are striking enough that scholars have long speculated about direct connections. Consider the character progressions that some historians have proposed:

• Pappus, the foolish old man of Atellan Farce, becomes Pantalone, the elderly Venetian merchant of Commedia—always scheming, always being outwitted by younger characters.
• Maccus and Buccus, the fool and the glutton, merge into Pulcinella—the hook-nosed, hunchbacked servant character who would eventually travel to England and become Mr. Punch of Punch and Judy fame.
• Manducus, the aggressive soldier type, transforms into il Capitano—the boastful military officer who talks endlessly about his brave deeds and runs away at the first sign of actual danger.

These connections are speculative, and scholars argue about them vigorously. There's no smoking gun, no document that says "and here is how Maccus became Pulcinella over the course of fifteen centuries." The theatrical traditions of ancient Rome didn't survive the empire's fall in any continuous way. When Commedia dell'arte emerged, the practitioners weren't consciously reviving Roman farce.

But ideas persist in strange ways. Mask-making traditions continued in Italy even as empires rose and fell. The basic human situations that made people laugh in 300 BC—the pompous fool, the lecherous elder, the clever servant outsmarting the stupid master—these didn't stop being funny just because Rome collapsed. And when Italian performers in the Renaissance developed a new improvised masked comedy, they may have drawn on cultural memories and folk traditions that stretched back, however indirectly, to those ancient Oscan entertainers.

What We Lost

Four hundred lines. That's all we have of a theatrical tradition that entertained audiences for half a millennium. From those fragments, and from about 115 play titles, and from images on pottery, we've reconstructed what we can. But imagine if we had the same evidence for modern sketch comedy—a handful of transcribed bits, some show titles, and photographs of performers in costume, but no video, no audio, no complete scripts.

We'd know that a character called "The Church Lady" appeared on something called "Saturday Night Live." We'd have a few of her catchphrases preserved in quotations. We might have an ancient vase—or in this case, a promotional photo—showing Dana Carvey in character. But we wouldn't really know what made the performance funny, wouldn't understand the timing or the delivery or the way the studio audience's laughter shaped the comedian's rhythm.

That's what we've lost with Atellan Farce. We know the form existed. We know it was wildly popular. We know the Romans laughed until they cried at the antics of Maccus and Pappus and Buccus. But we can't really laugh with them. The jokes, which must have been hilarious to audiences twenty-two centuries ago, have evaporated with the performers who made them up on the spot.

Why It Still Matters

Every time you watch a comedy that features instantly recognizable character types—the uptight boss, the slacker employee, the clueless parent, the scheming best friend—you're watching something that has roots in traditions like Atellan Farce. The specific masks are gone, but the underlying idea persists: audiences enjoy seeing familiar characters in new situations.

Every time performers improvise comedy on stage, making it up as they go, playing off each other and the audience, they're participating in a tradition that the Oscan performers of Atella would have recognized. The spontaneity, the collaboration, the willingness to fail publicly in pursuit of a laugh—these elements don't change just because the language and the setting do.

And every time political comedy provokes backlash from the powerful, every time a joke about someone important causes more trouble than the comedian expected, we're seeing a story that's been repeating since at least 28 AD, when Tiberius decided he'd had quite enough of being called an old goat.

The masks of Atellan Farce are silent now. But the laughter they generated echoes still.