At the annual Athenian
drama festival in 426 BC,
a comic play called The Babylonians,
written by a young poet
named Aristophanes,
was awarded first prize.
But the play’s depiction of Athens’
conduct during the Peloponnesian War
was so controversial that afterwards,
a politician named Kleon
took Aristophanes to court
for "slandering the people of Athens
in the presence of foreigners."
Aristophanes struck back two years later
with a play called The Knights.
In it, he openly mocked Kleon,
ending with Kleon’s character working as
a lowly sausage seller
outside the city gates.
This style of satire was a consequence
of the unrestricted democracy
of 5th century Athens
and is now called "Old Comedy."
Aristophanes’ plays, the world’s earliest
surviving comic dramas,
are stuffed full of parodies, songs,
sexual jokes, and surreal fantasy.
They often use wild situations,
like a hero flying to heaven
on a dung beetle,
or a net cast over a house to keep
the owner’s father trapped inside,
in order to subvert audience expectations.
And they’ve shaped how comedy’s
been written and performed ever since.
The word "comedy" comes from
the Ancient Greek "komos," – revel,
and "oide," – singing,
and it differed from its companion
art form, "tragedy" in many ways.
Where ancient Athenian tragedies dealt
with the downfall of the high and mighty,
their comedies usually ended happily.
And where tragedy almost always
borrowed stories from legend,
comedy addressed current events.
Aristophanes’ comedies celebrated ordinary
people and attacked the powerful.
His targets were arrogant politicians,
war-mongering generals,
and self-important intellectuals,
exactly the people who sat in
the front row of the theatre,
where everyone could see their reactions.
As a result, they were referred to
as komoidoumenoi:
"those made fun of in comedy."
Aristophanes’ vicious
and often obscene mockery
held these leaders to account,
testing their commitment to the city.
One issue, in particular,
inspired much of Aristophanes’ work:
the Peloponnesian War
between Athens and Sparta.
In Peace, written in 421 BC,
a middle-aged Athenian frees
the embodiment of peace from a cave,
where she’d been exiled
by profiteering politicians.
Then, in the aftermath of a crushing
naval defeat for Athens in 411 BC,
Aristophanes wrote "Lysistrata."
In this play, the women
of Athens grow sick of war
and go on a sex strike
until their husbands make peace.
Other plays use similarly fantastic
scenarios to skewer topical situations,
such as in "Clouds,"
where Aristophanes mocked
fashionable philosophical thinking.
The hero Strepsiades enrolls in
Socrates’s new philosophical school,
where he learns
how to prove that wrong is right
and that a debt is not a debt.
No matter how outlandish these plays get,
the heroes always prevail in the end.
Aristophanes also became
the master of the parabasis,
a comic technique where actors
address the audience directly,
often praising the playwright
or making topical comments and jokes.
For example, in "Birds,"
the Chorus takes
the role of different birds
and threatens the Athenian judges that
if their play doesn’t win first prize,
they’ll defecate on them
as they walk around the city.
Perhaps the judges
didn’t appreciate the joke,
as the play came in second.
By exploring new ideas
and encouraging self-criticism
in Athenian society,
Aristophanes not only
mocked his fellow citizens,
but he shaped the nature of comedy itself.
Hailed by some scholars
as the father of comedy,
his fingerprints are visible
upon comic techniques everywhere,
from slapstick
to double acts
to impersonations
to political satire.
Through the praise of free speech
and the celebration of ordinary heroes,
his plays made his audience think
while they laughed.
And his retort to Kleon in 425 BC
still resonates today:
“I’m a comedian,
so I’ll speak about justice,
no matter how hard
it sounds to your ears.”
