Comedy is a strange genre. Even the best comedies are strongly tied to the time and place of their composition. Just try getting all the jokes in Shakespeare without peeking at the footnotes for help.
But every now and again, a comedic gem shines through the ages, even from as far back as Classical Greece. Maybe this is because ancient Greek ideas are so deeply embedded in Western culture, or maybe Athens just produced some truly brilliant playwrights. Whatever the case, some Greek comedies still entertain millennia after their first performances.
Ancient Greek comedy encompasses centuries, so scholars often break it down into three distinct periods. Old Comedy (5th century BC) is characterized by its focus on social and political issues, with plenty of farce and innuendo. Middle Comedy (400–320 BC) moves away from the political to favor myth-based parodies and stock characters. Finally, New Comedy (320 to the mid-3rd century) leans into a style modern audiences would see as similar to situational comedy, while also introducing the five-act structure that would come to dominate European theater.
Today, we look at four Greek plays: three Old Comedies and one New Comedy. This split isn’t because Old Comedies are more amusing than those from the other periods. It is, in part, because the Middle Comedies are mostly lost to us, and few New Comedies have survived to the present day. Even among the relatively better-represented Old Comedies, all the works we have today were penned by the playwright Aristophanes.
It’s a sad thought, but many hilarious and innovative works may be lost to time. Thankfully, we can still enjoy these plays.
Lysistrata (411 BC)
O women, if we would compel the men to bow to Peace, … We must refrain from every depth of love …. Why do you turn your backs? Where are you going? Why do you bite your lips and shake your heads? Why are your faces blanched? Why do you weep?
Aristophanes’ best-known play, Lysistrata, is an anti-war farce that puts most other comedies written in the last 2,000 years to shame. Performed during the Peloponnesian War, the play is at once incredibly raunchy, remarkably clever, horribly dated, and effortlessly timeless.
It opens with Lysistrata calling a meeting of women from the warring Greek city-states. As the war drags on and men are dying on far-off battlefields, families at home are being broken. Despite women having no voice in government, Lysistrata proposes a radical plan to force the men to the negotiating table: a sex strike across the whole of Greece.
Although she struggles to get the others to agree, the strike begins. The Greek women lock themselves in the Acropolis, both to keep their distance from the men and to hold the Athenian treasury hostage. The strike lasts a while despite various attempts by the increasingly desperate men to get the women to come to terms. Meanwhile, Lysistrata must keep the women motivated by reminding them how important their work is (and how giving up too soon will prevent women in future plays from receiving good roles).
Eventually, the Greek men relent and negotiate an end to the war. There is much, let’s say, celebration.
Lysistrata is a farce, obviously, and one that holds up better than others in some ways. For instance, the ancient Greeks would have found the idea of women taking such direct political action absurd, and the plot relies on gender stereotypes that would have made more sense in the extremely sexist Athenian society. That said, the play inverts those stereotypes, too, and today it can be read as an anti-war comedy with a feminist edge. The fact that misguided quagmires seem to never go out of fashion doesn’t hurt its popularity.
The play continues to enjoy new translations and adaptations to this day. In 2015, Spike Lee adapted it into a film titled Chi-Raq, moving the action from the Mediterranean to Chicago’s South Side.
Dyskolos (316 BC)
This man has lived here a reasonably long time and has gladly talked in his life to no one, has spoken first to no one except — of necessity, since he is a neighbor and passes by — me, Pan. And he immediately regrets it, I’m sure.
Written by the poet Menander, Dyskolos is the only New Comedy play to have survived in a nearly complete form; all others are missing large segments of their text. It covers themes immediately recognizable to modern audiences through its romantic-comedy elements.
The play begins with Pan, the Satyr-shaped god of nature, describing one of his neighbors, the reclusive, misanthropic Knemon. Pan explains that Knemon has a pious daughter whom he will reward by making a rich city boy, Sostratos, fall in love with her. Additionally, Pan wants Knemon to have something of a redemption arc, even if against his will.
As arranged by Pan, Sostratos sends one of his servants to speak with Knemon about his daughter. Sostratos initially has high hopes for the meeting, but the servant, Pyrrhias, returns beaten nearly senseless by Knemon, who hates visitors. Sostratos is advised to try working in the fields next to Knemon’s as a way of earning his favor — after all, grouchy poor farmers are more likely to favor marrying their daughters to other farmers. At the same time, Sostratos’ family heads off to make a sacrifice to Pan after dreaming a terrible omen: Their son doing manual labor.
Hijinks ensue. Knemon falls into a well and is rescued by other members of the cast. While recuperating, he resolves to be friendlier — since being a jerk got him stuck at the bottom of a well — and gives an extremely sunburnt Sostaratos his blessing to marry his daughter. In the end, several people get married, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Between each of the five acts, a chorus of drunken Pan worshippers dance to music. Interestingly, they don’t exit the stage after their performance and lounge about the stage even when they’re not needed.
The play is very class-conscious for its time. It features considerable intermingling up and down the social hierarchy. While it offers an idealized view of marriage, especially among members of different classes, none of the characters are presented as perfect or better than others because of their status or birth.
The Clouds (423 BC)
Consider, therefore, how you have trumpeted from a little belly so small; and how is it not probable that this air, being boundless, should thunder so loudly?
The play Plato blamed for Socrates’ death, Aristophanes’ The Clouds is a hysterical send-up of faux-intellectualism and those who want to weaponize it. The play presents a version of Socrates very different from Plato’s, resembling more a pre-Socratic philosopher or even a sophist. The results are enduringly funny, even if it didn’t help Socrates’ case.
Its story begins with the middle-aged Strepsiades in a jam. His wife has encouraged their son, Pheidippides, to live like an Ancient Greek NEET. Despite being an adult, he bums around at home, wastes his family’s money betting on the ponies, and refuses to contribute. As you might expect, this causes the debts to start piling up.
Luckily, Strepsiades has a solution. The Thinkery, a school for those who want to learn to turn bad arguments into winning ones, is taking new students. Strepsiades hopes to enroll his son so he can weasel the family out of debt, but he is forced to attend himself when his son refuses to become a nerd.
Freshly matriculated as a non-traditional student, Strepsiades meets the great and famous headmaster, Socrates. Socrates has been focusing on such important questions as why gnats buzz, how to measure flea jumps, and how to steal clothes from gymnasiums.
Unfortunately, Strepsiades isn’t adept at lying his way out of any problem, so Socrates kicks him out. Pheidippides is sent to learn in his father’s place. While he graduates from the Thinkery, it comes at a terrible cost — he becomes a sophist. He manages to talk his family out of debt, but also becomes very good at arguing that children should be allowed to beat their parents for bad behavior (much to Strepsiades’ chagrin).
Famously, the play depicts Socrates as a bullshit artist and atheist — he offers materialist, if far-fetched, explanations for a variety of natural phenomena. While quite funny, the character doesn’t have much to do with the philosophy espoused in Plato’s writings, and some have suggested that the play represents a younger Socrates, one who had not yet come into his own. Worse still, Plato argued that this popular depiction doomed Socrates at his trial for corrupting the youth of Athens.
(If you’d like to find out what happened to Socrates after the city started thinking he was an atheistic con-artist, you can read Plato’s Apology and Xenophon’s Apology of Socrates to the Jury.)
Thesmophoriazusae (411 BC)
Today the women at the festival are going to kill me for insulting them!
Let’s wrap up with one more side-splitter from Aristophanes. Thesmophoriazusae, also known as The Poet and the Women, was first performed the same year as Lysistrata but takes a slightly different direction in its parody of sex and gender. Devoid of the anti-populist or anti-war stances of his other play, this one turns its barbs toward poets and playwrights. It also finds time to do to the fourth wall what the Syracusan army did to the Athenians during the Sicilian expedition of 415.
Thesmophoriazusae follows a satirical version of the playwright Euripides. Well-known for his stereotypical depictions of women, he has begun to fear that the women of Athens will take vengeance upon him. In fact, word has it that the women are hatching a plot against him at the women-only festival of Thesmophoria.
Deciding not to take this lying down, Euripides reaches out to Agathon (also a caricature of a real playwright) to ask him to spy on the women despite being religiously forbidden from attending the sacred festival. While Agathon is already in drag as he prepares for a new play, he worries that the women of Athens will envy his beauty and so refuses to go. The two dress up Euripides’ aging in-law in stage costume instead and send him on his way.
At the mysterious festival, the women meet in the style of the Athenian Assembly, complete with officials maintaining the rules of order and keeping minutes, to decide what to do about Euripides. They are concerned his plays are teaching men not to trust women, which is a problem because they really want to misbehave but now men are onto them.
Cleisthenes, the Athenian ambassador to the women (also a caricature of a real statesman), arrives to tell them that a man has infiltrated their meeting. The women determine it must be the one person there that nobody knows, and Euripides’ in-law only escapes by holding a wineskin at knife-point, much to the horror of the hard-partying women. While he gets away from the women, he is soon after arrested.
Euripides attempts to rescue his in-law by dressing as well-known characters, including Echo, Perseus, and King Menelaus of Sparta. Unfortunately, none of these attempts work — though they do lead to excellent spoofs of famous scenes from other plays. Not helping matters is that everyone on stage has also seen those shows and knows what will happen next.
Eventually, Euripides must negotiate with the Greek Chorus, which is made up of women. In exchange for not insulting them in his next play, they agree not to tip off the rest of the cast about the next rescue attempt. Euripides rescues his in-law by dressing in drag and distracting the police.
Much like Lysistrata, Thesmophoriazusae inverts many gender stereotypes. For instance, the women manage their own affairs with the rigor of the Athenian state, while the men act irrationally and subversively. However, like Lysistrata, the play ends with the audience walking out with those stereotypes reinforced.
This article 4 hilarious ancient Greek comedies — that still hold up today is featured on Big Think.