Comedy

Five comedies made up the program on the second day of the City Dionysia (Storey 2002). This genre is far better documented than the dithyramb; we possess no fewer than eleven plays by Aristophanes. In the case of comedy, too, however, the pattern of transmission poses considerable problems when it comes to reconstructing the genre and its development. In the first place, the extant plays from the years 426 (Achar-nians) to 388 (Wealth) document only a short period in the long and undoubtedly colorful history of Old Comedy, which was added to the official festival program of the City Dionysia in 486, but was surely being produced and exerting an influence far earlier. Secondly, all the extant comedies are the work of only one of the many playwrights whose names we know. On the other hand, the fragments of Aristophanes’ predecessors and contemporaries display certain differences from Aristophanic comedy both in form and in content (Landfester 1979),1 but there is also a strong family resemblance to the surviving comedies. We may conclude that even if we possessed not just fragments but entire plays by Eupolis or Cratinus, the two other major representatives of Old Comedy, the clear generic boundaries with tragedy (for which see Taplin 1986 and 1996) would not be blurred.

Plato emphasizes the separation between the two major dramatic genres at the end of the Symposium. Only with difficulty can Socrates compel his two interlocutors, Agathon and Aristophanes, to acknowledge that one and the same playwright would be capable of composing both tragedies and comedies {Symposium 223d1-7). The passage shows that up to now the clear separation of tragedy and comedy has been regarded as a matter of course by both successful practitioners of the two genres, and also that the separation is assumed by Plato to be universally valid. In fact, there is not a single documented case of a playwright who verified Socrates’ thesis, and what is true for the composition of the plays also holds true for their performance. The first actor who is reliably attested to have performed in tragedies as well as comedies lived around 100 bce {O’Connor 1908, no. 415).

To be sure, tragedy and comedy display similarities resulting from their shared dramatic mode, the common context of their origin and development, and their conditions of production. Both share the same theater, employ costumes and masks, and involve a chorus whose singing and dancing is accompanied by an aulos-player. On closer scrutiny, however, even these obvious similarities prove superficial. For example, the staging of tragedy and comedy alike is subject to the spatial and structural limitations of the Theater of Dionysus at the foot of the Acropolis, but tragedy and comedy accommodate these limitations in different ways. While in tragedy the one-story stage building normally represented a palace {and on occasion also a temple, tent, hut, or cave), in comedy it served, insofar as it is defined at all, as a visual sign of an urban ambience. When it comes to masks and costumes the difference is even more obvious. While the heroes and heroines of tragedy wore a longsleeved garment, distinct from the everyday clothing of the audience, that reached to the feet and was adorned with rich geometric and figural decorations, the actors of Old Comedy were grotesquely fitted out. A tight flesh-colored leotard represented stage nudity; it was stuffed to emphasize the belly and the buttocks, and affixed to it was a huge phallus which was more emphasized than concealed by a skimpy shirt or coat {Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 180-90 [tragedy], 220-23 [comedy]). Complementing the outfit, the masks of comedy were grotesquely exaggerated, their most prominent feature being a gaping asymmetrical mouth. In contrast the masks of classical tragedy, as occasional representations on vases suggest, were naturalistic, and differentiated mainly with respect to gender and age {Pickard-Cambridge 1988, 190-96 [tragedy], 218-20 [comedy]). The choruses of tragedy and comedy, finally, not only differed in size {tragedy had twelve chorus members to begin with, raised to fifteen by Sophocles, whereas comedy had twenty-four), but had completely different dramatic functions. The dance and music, about which we are very poorly informed, must also have been sharply distinct {Taplin 1996, 191-94).

It is accordingly apparent that even the few elements which comedy and tragedy have in common {theater space, masks and costumes, chorus, dance, and music) serve more to differentiate than to link the two genres. Ancient theory also defines tragedy and comedy as polar opposites, diametrically opposed to each other in subject matter, characters, style, plot, and outcome, as well as in effect.

While tragedy draws its subject matter from the rich reservoir of Greek myth and only rarely and in its early period dramatized current historical events {see Cropp, chapter 17 in this volume), comedy invents its own stories. In so doing it adapts places, situations, topics, issues, and frequently also individuals from the immediate present. While tragedy transports the audience to times long past and {as a rule) to more or less distant places, Aristophanes’ comedies as a rule take place within the walls of an Athens plagued by the Peloponnesian War and its consequences.

Of course, tragedy too uses the traditional stories in order to discuss the burning questions of the present (Meier 1993). The analyses of the French School associated with Vernant, Detienne, and Loraux, as well as numerous studies influenced by New Historicism, have revealed to what extent and by what means fifth-century tragedy participated in the social discourses of its time. Tragedy participates, however, in a way that is fundamentally different from comedy. Comedy addresses current problems directly and does not hesitate to name the individuals responsible and to mount personal attacks against them (onomasti kOmOidein, ‘‘to make fun of by name’’). Thus Aristophanic comedy discusses the war and its consequences, democracy and demagogy, the popular assembly and the judicial system, sophistry and education, rhetoric and literature - especially tragedy. It ridicules Socrates and Euripides and attacks the political heavyweights of the time - Nicias, Demosthenes, Pericles, Alcibiades, and (repeatedly) Cleon - either overtly or in transparent disguises.

Furthermore, the connection between stage and audience is closer in comedy than in tragedy because the boundary between play and reality remains entirely penetrable. The spectators are regularly addressed, and included in the play in ever new ways (Taplin 1986, 172-73). Tragedy, in contrast, remains in its own world (Bain 1977) and relies on the audience to supply the contemporary applications. More or less obvious anachronisms (Easterling 1985a), as well as the aetiologies that figure at the end of many plays and connect some fifth-century cult practice with the time of its origin, are the only textual markers that signal the contemporary relevance of the mythical material. It is up to the spectators to draw the lines linking the play to the present.

As a corollary to the difference in subject matter, tragedy and comedy also differ from each other with regard to the moral quality and social position of their characters. While tragedy presents heroes drawn from myth who are better and/or occupy a higher social position than the average, comedy entertains its audience with characters drawn from everyday life, who are just like or worse than the audience itself (Aristotle, Poetics 1448a16-18; b24-27). Moreover, the characters of tragedy are fairly homogeneous. Ordinary people appear only in supporting roles, and gods are for the most part confined to the beginning and ending of the plays. Comedy, however, brings on stage a colorful melange of ordinary people and prominent politicians, gods and personifications of abstract concepts, and feels free to introduce all manner of animals (for example, birds or frogs), who speak or sing as a chorus.

The style of tragedy is serious and elevated, in conformance with its subject matter and its characters. Naturally each of the three great tragedians developed his own style; nevertheless tragic language, as compared to contemporary comedy, is fairly homogeneous both overall and within a single tragedy. Messengers, servants, and nurses speak the same language as kings and gods. Linguistic and stylistic differences serve only to mark off the different levels and components of tragedy: they differentiate spoken sections from those recited and sung, or messenger-speech from stichomythia, or monody from chorus.

The same differences are of course also found in comedy. In addition, however, the style of Aristophanic comedy is marked throughout by a colorful mix of heterogeneous stylistic elements and registers: pointed brevity and extravagant fullness, lofty poetic imagery and crude, direct obscenity, colloquial frankness and paratragic pathos. We also encounter borrowings from contemporary scientific and political discourse and from the most diverse literary genres, ranging from Homeric epic to the new dithyramb, as well as frequent dialect forms and barbarisms. All these combine - often in astonishing juxtaposition - into a richly textured idiom whose trademarks Silk rightly determined to be diversity, collision, and exuberance (Silk 2000, 120-59).

The plots and component parts of tragedy and comedy are also clearly different from each other. The basic dramatic rhythm of tragedy is shaped by a more or less regular alternation between episodes involving actors (which may extend over one or more scenes), and choral lyric (Taplin 1977, 49-60). The elements of comedy, such as the seven-part parabasis (the ‘‘stepping forth’’ of the chorus to address the audience) or the complex agon (debate scene), are also worked out in rigorous detail; overall, however, the structure of Aristophanic plays is looser and more open than that of tragedy.

Aristotle never tires of emphasizing that the different parts of a tragic action should develop out of one another according to the rules of probability or necessity. In fact it is important for our sense of the tragic, as well as for Greek tragedy, that the disaster should follow as a natural and logical result of the actions and qualities of the characters. Tragedy depends on a certain proximity to real life, not only with respect to the internal logic of the dramatic development, but also with respect to the nature of the material and the individual situations and events, which should not be implausible (apithanon: Poetics 1460a27; 61b12), much less impossible (adunaton: 1451b17-19; 60b23-26; 61b9-12) or irrational (alogon: 1454b6-8; 61b4-8). The audience must not lose the feeling ‘‘that real persons in a real situation act and suffer in a real way’’ (Kitto 1961, 314). Otherwise the possibility of identifying oneself with the problems and sufferings of the heroes is lost, and without such identification the tragic effect is not possible. Old Comedy, on the other hand, draws its strength from fantastic and fabulously irrational ideas and actions which not infrequently shape the entire plot. One protagonist buys himself a thirty-year private peace in the shape of old wine (Acharnians); another flies up to Olympus on a giant dung beetle to bring back to earth the goddess of peace, who is being held captive by Ares (Peace); now women take over the state (Women at the Assembly), or by means of a sex strike force the men to end the war (Lysistrata); now two unhappy Athenians leave home and together with the birds establish a new state situated between heaven and earth ( Birds); now the god of theater descends to the underworld and presides over a contest in which Aeschylus and Euripides compete over who is the best tragedian and will be allowed to return to Athens (Frogs). In this world probability and necessity do not rule, but rather arbitrary acts and pure chance, and the individual scenes of the plays are not infrequently linked up paratactically; they take place after one another ( meta tade) rather than - as in tragedy - because of one another (dia tade; for the distinction see Aristotle, Poetics 1452a20-21).

An additional difference is that comedy constantly draws the audience’s attention to its quality as fictional play (Taplin 1986). The tactics used extend from the direct and indirect involvement of the audience in the play to references to the festival and the competition in whose context the play is being performed. We encounter references to the author and his text and, finally, the text constantly alludes to its own theatricality. In tragedy self-referentiality was for a long time limited to statements made by the members of the chorus about their own singing and dancing (Henrichs 1994-95, 1996a, 1996c). Even when, with Euripides, this convention begins to change (Arnott 1973, 1978, 1982, Foley 1985, Segal 1982), the self-consciously theatrical remarks remain indirect, and the same is true for satyr-play (Kaimio et al. 2001). Comedy, in contrast, never misses an opportunity to present itself as theater.

Finally, tragic action is determined by extraordinary physical and/or mental suffering. As Aristotle recognized, the tragic effect is not achieved without a disastrous or painful event (pathos: Poetics 1452b9-13), either actual or imminent, that must be ‘‘incurable’’ (anekeston:. 1453b35) or at least must be perceived as inevitable or unalterable for some extended period of time by those affected. In Greek tragedy this disaster does not necessarily form the end of the play. A glance at the Aeschylean Oresteia or the later plays of Sophocles shows us that tragic conflicts can be resolved, great dangers survived, and great suffering overcome. But even the trilogies and tragedies that end happily are with a very few exceptions shaped by agonizing and destructive events.

In contrast, Aristotle defines the ridiculous as ‘‘a fault and a mark of shame, but lacking in pain and destruction’’ (Poetics 1449a34-35, trans. Halliwell 1986). Although the protagonists of Old Comedy grumble and threaten, beat their adversaries up and chase them away, nobody is ever seriously harmed. At the end the hero has generally reached his goal and fulfilled his dream. The war is ended (Lysistrata), peace achieved (Acharnians, Peace), the hated politician driven out and the state as young and beautiful as in the good old days (Knights).

The quality of the characters, language and style, subject matter, structure of the action, and outcome: all these contribute to the emotional effect, which Aristotle describes as the ‘‘appropriate pleasure’’ (Poetics 1453b11) of both dramatic genres. Tragedy aims at the psychagogic shock of the spectator. It arouses his fear (phobos) for the characters who are threatened by suffering and death, as well as his fear for himself, to whom the same or something similar might happen; it also arouses his pity (eleos) for the individuals and their heartrending fate. Comedy, in contrast, aims to entertain and amuse. Like modern cabaret, Old Comedy tries to induce laughter even as it pursues serious pedagogic or political aims. In recent years Gomme’s thesis (1938) that comedy disclaims seriousness even when it participates in contemporary intellectual and political discourse has found fresh support. The advocates of this view (Heath 1987c, Halliwell 1984a) have with considerable astuteness drawn attention to the difficulties that stand in the way of a consistent political interpretation of Aris-tophanic comedy; they emphasize above all its performative and artistic quality. Yet comedy’s analysis of the political and social, intellectual, and moral questions of the time is hardly less profound than that of tragedy. In the parabasis of the first surviving comedy of Aristophanes the chorus claims for its playwright that ‘‘he will keep on saying what’s just in his comedies’’ (Acharnians 655) and that he will give ‘‘the best instruction’’ (658) to the city and its citizens. Regardless of whether Aristophanes lived up to this claim (which is also the core criterion for the choice of best tragedian in Frogs), there can be no doubt that he was serious about the seriousness of his comedies (Reinhardt 1938, Taplin 1983b, Henderson 1990, Brockmann 2003; for a balanced assessment see Silk 2000, 300-49).