The Humorous Classicist

Whodda thunk that a reason for studying classical languages and literature would be the exercise of the funny bone. I was recently introduced to Tales of a Wayward Classicist through a Facebook entry that steered me to a hilarious blog on illiterate Latin tatoos. Turns out that the Wayward Classicist performs the cyber version of stand up comic and is phenomenally good at it. Well, now, let me rethink my use or misuse of phenomenal. See? Classicists apparently make you more scrupulous about your use of language as well. Bored students, tenured and lazy professors, wedding magazines, and failures in domestic life all provide rich material for his blogs. Mrs. Church's course of Latin III never made Virgil seem all that funny, or even Ovid, for that matter, but WC's translations of Catullus or medieval Latin broadside poetry has me grinning broadly if not laughing out loud. Which makes me wonder - are there cells of subversive early Icelandic scholars out there? Are there Hebrew scholars skewering the inanities they find proliferating around them? Are there Sanskrit pundits sharpening their wits at the expense of aspiring twitterers? Think I'll tread softly for a while.