Unlike tragedy, which told stories of Greece’s mythical past and were almost always set outside of Athens, Old Comedy was set in the contemporary world – or at least, a parallel contemporary where fantastical things could happen and any ordinary citizen could develop heroic powers to challenge the system. Only one of Aristophanes’ comedies starts outside of Athens, and well-known Athenian figures, such as Euripides and Socrates, frequently pop up in his plays to be ruthlessly lampooned. Given the focus on politics in Aristophanes’ plays, some scholars have tried to identify from the texts whether Aristophanes was a supporter of Athenian democracy or a conservative oligarch. The difficulty is that, when reading comedy, it is never clear what is serious and what is a joke – even, and perhaps especially, when Aristophanes claims to be making a serious point, we should never take him at his own word. As Goldhill notes, that’s part of the essence of Old Comedy – ‘how far, how serious, how comic, how literal, how applicable to me, to us, to them, to you are questions that Aristophanes’ writing constantly poses for its readers and audiences’ (Goldhill, Simon 1991, The Poet’s Voice. Cambridge: CUP. 194). Watching or reading Old Comedy is therefore always an active process of interrogating the relative seriousness of it. 

The most important question we can ask about any comedy is, ‘how is this funny?’. Aristophanes uses a dazzling array of different techniques to make his audience laugh, from clever word puns to complex parodies of Greek tragedy. He also, of course, indulges in obscenity. The opening scene of Frogs (405 BC) demonstrates how different modes of humour can interact in Old Comedy. Xanthias, a slave, is lugging around some heavy baggage on a journey with his master, Dionysus. Xanthias asks permission to tell a funny joke as he struggles with the load (slapstick). Dionysus says he can say what he likes, as long as he doesn’t make a scatological reference (obscenity). By refusing to let his slave make such jokes, Dionysus inadvertently says the punchline himself (irony, bathos). Xanthias then complains that other comedians let their characters say rude jokes (breaking the fourth wall, intertextuality). These different modes of humour are layered on top of each other. Whether audience-members laugh at the simple scatology and slapstick, or at the more complicated pastiching of comedy, or at both, Aristophanes is making sure that there is something for everybody to laugh at. Aristophanic comedy has been criticised for not maintaining unity of plot and can appear fairly episodic to modern audiences. But Aristophanes was not concerned with telling a coherent story. His goal was to be as funny as possible. 

Aristophanes’ modern Anglophone reception is slight compared to the towering influence of Greek tragedy. He has always been a popular choice for school and university Greek plays; Cambridge first staged Aristophanes’ Birds as early as 1883 – a choice perhaps prompted by J.R. Planché’s Birds of 1846 (see fig.1), the only professional production in Victorian Britain of an Aristophanic comedy. In 1974, Stephen Sondheim scored a musical version of The Frogs, performed in the swimming pool at Yale; it received its Broadway debut in 2004. Spike Lee directed and co-wrote Chi-Raq in 2015, an adaptation of Lysistrata exploring gun violence in America (see fig.2). By far the most influential productions of Old Comedy in the twentieth century were staged by Karolos Koun, the Greek director whose productions drew on modern Greek folk traditions and were toured throughout Europe and the United States. Greece and Italy have long and vibrant histories of staging Aristophanes. But comedy is harder to translate than tragedy – jokes often lose their humour in translation, and contemporary allusions lose meaning. So Aristophanes remains a semi-canonical playwright, even if his plays still have the potential to satirise and provoke.