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Ovidians today agree that humour is central to understanding the Metamorphoses; but much disagreement exists about what passages are funny; what type of humour is used; and what response it is intended to elicit. Since his own time Ovid's humour has provoked criticism: Quintilian and the two Senecas criticise him for introducing to the Metamorphoses an inappropriate tone. The Romantics found Ovid's humour in bad taste. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries it was taken to be light and on the surface. More recently scholars identify his humour as either deep and humane or hateful and misogynistic. This division is caused, in my opinion, by Ovid's black humour, which by its very nature is easily misunderstood or missed, especially by those inclined to see the tragic in things, disinclined to see comedy mixed into a scene of death or rape, inclined to think the tragic, serious and universal more worthy, profound and significant than the comic, base and particular.

A text is a device conceived in order to produce its Model Reader. I repeat that this reader is not the one who makes the ‘only right’ conjecture. A text can foresee a Model Reader entitled to try infinite conjectures. The empirical reader is only an actor who makes conjectures about the kind of Model Reader postulated by the text. Since the intention of the text is basically to produce a Model Reader able to make conjectures about it, the initiative of the Model Reader consists in figuring out a Model Author that is not the empirical one and that, at the end, coincides with the intention of the text. (Eco)

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