Jokes In Greek Comedy

In ancient Greek comedy, nothing is ever 'just a joke'. This book treats jokes with the seriousness they deserve, and shows that far from being mere surface-level phenomena, jokes in Greek comedy are in fact a site of poetic experimentation whose creative force expressly rivals that of serious literature. Focusing on the fragments of authors including Cratinus, Pherecrates, and Archippus alongside the extant plays of Aristophanes, Naomi Scott argues that jokes are critical to comedy's engagement with the language and convention of poetic representation. More than this, she suggests that jokes and poetry share a kind of kinship as two modes of utterance which specifically set out to flout the rules of ordinary speech. Starting with bad puns, and taking in crude slapstick, vulgar innuendo and frivolous absurdism, Jokes in Greek Comedy demonstrates that the apparently inconsequential jokes which pepper the surface of Greek comedy in fact amplify the impossible and defamiliarizing qualities of standard poetic practice, and reveal the fundamental ridiculousness of treating make-believe as a serious endeavour. In this way, jokes form a central part of Greek comedy's contestation of the role of language, and particularly poetic language, in the truthful representation of reality.

In ancient Greek comedy, nothing is ever 'just a joke'. This book treats jokes with the seriousness they deserve, and shows that far from being mere surface-level phenomena, jokes in Greek comedy are in fact a site of poetic experimentation whose creative force expressly rivals that of serious literature. Focusing on the fragments of authors including Cratinus, Pherecrates, and Archippus alongside the extant plays of Aristophanes, Naomi Scott argues that jokes are critical to comedy's engagement with the language and convention of poetic representation. More than this, she suggests that jokes and poetry share a kind of kinship as two modes of utterance which specifically set out to flout the rules of ordinary speech. Starting with bad puns, and taking in crude slapstick, vulgar innuendo and frivolous absurdism, Jokes in Greek Comedy demonstrates that the apparently inconsequential jokes which pepper the surface of Greek comedy in fact amplify the impossible and defamiliarizing qualities of standard poetic practice, and reveal the fundamental ridiculousness of treating make-believe as a serious endeavour. In this way, jokes form a central part of Greek comedy's contestation of the role of language, and particularly poetic language, in the truthful representation of reality.

Originally published in 1931, this book surveys the origin and development of Greek Comic Drama, with full discussion not only of Aristophanes and Menander but also of other important playwrights whose work had usually received scant notice because only fragments of it have survived. The important papyrus-finds of the previous forty years have been expounded and used. The final chapter is an introduction to comic metre and rhythm.

Capturing the antic outrageousness and lyrical brilliance of antiquity’s greatest comedies, Aaron Poochigian’s Aristophanes: Four Plays brings these classic dramas to vivid life for a twenty-first century audience. The citizens of ancient Athens enjoyed a freedom of speech as broad as our own. This freedom, parrhesia, the right to say what one pleased, how and when one pleased, and to whom, had no more fervent champion than the brilliant fifth-century comic playwright Aristophanes. His plays, immensely popular with the Athenian public, were frequently crude, even obscene. He ridiculed the great and the good of the city, showing up their hypocrisy and arrogance in ways that went far beyond the standards of good taste, securing the ire (and sometimes the retaliation) of his powerful targets. He showed his contemporaries, and he teaches us now, that when those in power act obscenely, patriotic obscenity is a fitting response. Aristophanes’s satirical masterpieces were also surpassingly virtuosic works of poetry. The metrical variety of his plays has always thrilled readers who can access the original Greek, but until now, English translations have failed to capture their lyrical genius. Aaron Poochigian, the first poet-classicist to tackle these plays in a generation, brings back to life four of Aristophanes’s most entertaining, wickedly crude, and frequently beautiful lyric comedies—the pinnacle of his comic art: · Clouds, a play famous for its caricature of antiquity’s greatest philosopher, Socrates; · Lysistrata, in which a woman convinces her female compatriots to withhold sex from their warmongering lovers unless they negotiate peace; · Birds, in which feathered creatures build a great city and become like gods; · and Women of the Assembly, Aristophones’s most revolutionary play, which inverts the norms of gender and power. Poochigian’s new rendering of these comic masterpieces finally gives contemporary readers a sense of the subversive pleasure Aristophones’s original audiences felt when they were first performed on the Athenian stage.

Paracomedy: Appropriations of Comedy in Greek Drama is the first book that examines how ancient Greek tragedy engages with the genre of comedy. While scholars frequently study paratragedy (how Greek comedians satirize tragedy), this book investigates the previously overlooked practice of paracomedy: how Greek tragedians regularly appropriate elements from comedy such as costumes, scenes, language, characters, or plots. Drawing upon a wide variety of complete and fragmentary tragedies and comedies (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Rhinthon), this monograph demonstrates that paracomedy was a prominent feature of Greek tragedy. Blending a variety of interdisciplinary approaches including traditional philology, literary criticism, genre theory, and performance studies, this book offers innovative close readings and incisive interpretations of individual plays. Jendza presents paracomedy as a multivalent authorial strategy: some instances impart a sense of ugliness or discomfort; others provide a sense of light-heartedness or humor. While this work traces the development of paracomedy over several hundred years, it focuses on a handful of Euripidean tragedies at the end of the fifth century BCE. Jendza argues that Euripides was participating in a rivalry with the comedian Aristophanes and often used paracomedy to demonstrate the poetic supremacy of tragedy; indeed, some of Euripides' most complex uses of paracomedy attempt to re-appropriate Aristophanes' mockery of his theatrical techniques. Paracomedy: Appropriations of Comedy in Greek Tragedy theorizes a new, ground-breaking relationship between Greek tragedy and comedy that not only redefines our understanding of the genre of tragedy, but also reveals a dynamic theatrical world filled with mutual cross-generic influence.

Providing an interdisciplinary look at Greece’s Muslim minority and migrant communities, this book provides an exhaustive legal analysis of regulations and broadens our understanding of the political management of ethnic and religious otherness, while placing these phenomena in historical context.

Ancient Greek comedy relied primarily on its text and words for the fulfilment of its humorous effects and aesthetic goals. In the wake of a rich tradition of previous scholarship, this volume explores a variety of linguistic materials and stylistic artifices exploited by the Greek comic poets, from vocabulary and figures of speech (metaphors, similes, rhyme) to types of joke, obscenity, and the mechanisms of parody. Most of the chapters focus on Aristophanes and Old Comedy, which offers the richest arsenal of such techniques, but the less ploughed fields of Middle and New Comedy are also explored. Emphasis is placed on practical criticism and textual readings, on the examination of particular artifices of speech and the analysis of individual passages. The main purpose is to highlight the use of language for the achievement of the aesthetic, artistic, and intellectual purposes of ancient comedy, in particular for the generation of humour and comic effect, the delineation of characters, the transmission of ideological messages, and the construction of poetic meaning. The volume will be useful to scholars of ancient drama, linguists, students of humour, and scholars of Classical literature in general.