AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
President Trump is celebrating the fact that comedians Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert are paying a price for targeting him and has also called for the axing of late-night TV show hosts Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers. NPR’s Chloe Veltman reports that the history of comedians displeasing heads of state and paying a heavy price for doing so is as long and winding as a Roman toga.
CHLOE VELTMAN: In 5th century B.C. Athens, as was the norm in the United States, it was a point of civic pride that comedians could say pretty much anything they wanted to the people in power.
MIKE FONTAINE: They could crack merciless jokes about politicians as those politicians sat in the audience.
VELTMAN: This is Mike Fontaine. He’s a professor of classics at Cornell University and the author of a book about ancient jokes.
FONTAINE: And nothing happened to those comedians.
VELTMAN: But there were limits, starting in the 4th century B.C., when the ancient Greek world became more autocratic. Fontaine says the Greek philosopher Plutarch – in a treatise written in around 100 A.D. – shared stories about the fates of comics who dared to make fun of their leaders. One of these cautionary tales concerns the ancient Greek satirist Sotades. He lived in Alexandria in the 3rd century B.C. When the ruler at the time, Ptolemy, married his sister, Arsinoe, Sotades wrote a poem telling the king…
FONTAINE: (Non-English language spoken).
VELTMAN: Rough translation – you’re pushing your scepter into an ungodly hole.
FONTAINE: And Ptolemy didn’t think it was funny, so he had him hauled away and put in prison.
VELTMAN: Then there’s Theocritus of Chios. The 4th century B.C. poet and politician was known for his witty criticism of powerful figures. But Fontaine says things took a serious turn when Theocritus got a gig working for a king named Antigonus the One-Eyed.
FONTAINE: He rather stupidly made a couple of jokes about Antigonus missing one eye.
VELTMAN: The punch line to one of these jokes went something like this.
FONTAINE: (Non-English language spoken).
VELTMAN: Theocritus is calling the king a cyclops – a cannibalistic, one-eyed monster. Fontaine says the king promptly had Theocritus executed. And it wasn’t just ancient Greek comedians who got canceled. Fontaine says Plutarch also shared similar stories about Roman funnymen.
FONTAINE: Everybody’s heard of Marcus Tullius Cicero, born in 106 B.C.E.
VELTMAN: The HBO TV series “Rome” depicts the famously caustic orator’s untimely execution.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) You must run.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) No. Too late for that.
VELTMAN: Cause of death – taking aim at Rome’s strongman leader Mark Antony.
FONTAINE: He delivered a famous series of speeches called The Philippics where he roasted Mark Antony over and over. He derided him in all kinds of terms – some funny, some not so funny. Mark Antony didn’t think it was funny at all.
VELTMAN: Fast forward to the United States of America, 2025.
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JIMMY KIMMEL: We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and…
VELTMAN: Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t been thrown behind bars or worse for the recent remarks he made on his late-night show. And this wasn’t a direct gibe at President Trump, though Kimmel has made many of those over the years. But scholars see a direct link between the fates of ancient comedians living through collapsing democracies and the crackdown on their descendants today. Stanford University history department chair Caroline Winterer studies the influence of the ancient world on early American history.
CAROLINE WINTERER: There is a very long tradition of basing the United States in the wisdom of classical antiquity and also of rulers thinking it’s part of being a ruler to allow people to mock them.
VELTMAN: She says this country’s founders were steeped in the writings of the ancients and from them understood that those in power should have thick skins.
WINTERER: Because along with the adulation of the masses comes the discontent of the masses with one of the sublimest weapons that we have in our arsenal of free speech.
VELTMAN: The weapon – a sense of humor. Chloe Veltman, NPR News.
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