ridiculous

Latin ridere meant to laugh, and the Romans built a family of words from that root. Ridiculus meant laughable or funny and named a specific social type: the scurra ridiculus, the buffoon hired to make audiences laugh at Roman banquets and theatrical performances. Plautus used the word in his comedies of the 2nd century BCE, and Cicero, writing in the 1st century BCE, analyzed what made something ridiculum with the same seriousness he brought to questions of government.

Cicero's treatise De Oratore, composed in 55 BCE, contains a sustained discussion of laughter and its uses in rhetoric. He distinguishes between jokes that ridicule individuals and those that ridicule situations, and argues that a skilled orator must know which is appropriate. From ridiculus came also ridiculosus, a somewhat stronger form, and both circulated in medieval Latin manuscripts long after Cicero was copied for his prose style rather than for oratorical advice.

The word crossed into English in the 1540s as a direct Latin borrowing meaning laughable or comic. In early modern English, ridiculous still carried a fairly neutral charge: a ridiculous situation was simply one that made people laugh. By the late 1600s, it had begun to shade toward contemptuous: a ridiculous man was not just funny but absurd, beneath serious argument.

Jonathan Swift used ridiculous repeatedly in Gulliver's Travels (1726) to dismiss ideas and customs he found not worth refuting. By Swift's time the laughter was aimed downward. Modern English ridiculous has completed the shift: it now means absurd or unreasonable, and the original pleasure in comedy has drained away. The root ridere survives in deride, risible, and ridicule, all tracing to the same Latin laugh that Plautus first put on stage.