4 ms·
I wonder if the point of the amphora is that pitch will cover the decoration or either it will seal the pores.
by narag 4y ago
I wonder if the point of the amphora is that pitch will cover the decoration or either it will seal the pores.
- derbOac 4y agoThat one has kind of turned in over my head a lot. I didn't think of the decoration for some reason when I first read it, but then it made more sense. I also imagine it would be pretty sticky? I think some of these things would land differently to an audience more intuitively familiar with these things in their daily lives.
- narag 4y agoSure, we used to have one of these in each home to drink cool water: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botijo https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botijo It doesn't work if you add decoration because it needs transpiration to cool the contents.
- t-3 4y agoI think it's about the decoration, and I'm pretty sure the guy who painted himself in pitch did so in order to pretend he was wearing the leggings he couldn't fit into.
- wahern 4y agoPresumably a stolen amphora would have been very fancy and possibly conspicuous, so more specifically the joke works like, a person bought a stolen Picasso to hang in his gallery, but crudely painted it over so he wouldn't get caught. I totally missed the pants/pitch joke, good catch. Reminds me of an episode of It's Always Sunny where Frank keeps flushing articles of clothing down the toilet and uses black paint to cover up, except it ends up being a pretext for a later, unrelated bit.
- joveian 4y agoI was wondering what other interpretation there could be. Still, while the translator chose a particularly dry way to put it I see that version as more likely. Putting on particularly tight clothing with any body hair at all tends to rip out hair, so I think the joke is about waxing rather than admitting the clothing is just too tight. You can imagine some pantomime after the joke. I've fairly sure I've seen at least one visual version of more or less this joke (in a cartoon). Personally, the idea that someone could invent a basic joke does not make sense to me. People can popularize specific jokes at a specific time but as I see it the jokes themselves are a physical part of the world there to be discovered and only specific detailed phrasing can really be created. Though I guess I would say the same about anything people are said to invent so maybe it is a matter of perspective. Still, I'd be surprised if a good portion of "modern humor" didn't predate homo sapiens as a species.