“‘Shut up,’ he explained.”
Surely that one-liner from Ring Lardner’s short story “The Young Immigrunts” — and no, that’s not a misspelling — constitutes one of the most humorous short sentences in all of literature. You don’t need to know a single detail about the story’s plot for “‘Shut up,’ he explained” to bring a chuckle.
In “Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome” (Gallery Books, 2007, 305 pages), author Robert Harris laces his account of the rise of young Marcus Tullius Cicero to power with humor as well. One line in particular, like Lardner’s, made me laugh aloud. “Lucius might have been a philosopher, but he was not a complete idiot.”
This comedic bit comes from Tiro, Cicero’s slave, confidant, and scribe, and the narrator of “Imperium.” Harris draws Tiro from the historical figure who was indeed Cicero’s slave and constant companion. Just like the real-life Tiro, Harris’s character invents a system of shorthand that enables him to quickly record the conversations and speeches of Cicero as well as those of others when the need arises. Later, it was the real-life Tiro who collected and recorded many of Cicero’s speeches and letters, along with some jokes. He wrote several books of his own and is believed to have written a biography of the Roman statesman, a book now lost to time and circumstance.