Well, it’s Greek Independence Day, at a historical moment when yahoo school districts are falling all over themselves to ban books so it seemed a propitious time to talk about those indecent founders of the art form I practice, the Athenians.
In the enlightened public high school I attended we were exposed to Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy. We read Oedipus Rex and discussed free will vs. determinism, and our drama club did Antigone, which is about a dilemma between filial duty and patriotism. We also read, if I remember correctly, all or part of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, as well as Euripides’ Medea. Before I was 20 I had read all the extant Greek tragedies on my own. My favorite of all plays is The Bacchae. The art of drama began after all as part of an annual celebration of Dionysus, God of wine, intoxication, madness, and sexual and religious ecstasy. Will this material be banned? It’s full of incest and murder and paganism. It’s pleasant to imagine the revenge of The Bacchae if those people do remove the Greeks from the bookshelves and the classrooms, but meantime students will suffer. This was already a land of Philistines. Soon its denizens may join pandas, sloths, turkeys and ostriches as the dumbest species to walk the earth.
I wrote at length about ancient clowning and the variety arts in my books No Applause and Chain of Fools. But in keeping with our ongoing spate of posts about Pagan and Medieval Roots of comic theatre and related matters, we thought we’d do a brief celebration of Greek comedy, the Foundation of All.
The word “comedy” is Greek, after all. It means “revel song” (kōmos + ōdē = kōmōidía). Comedy came late to the annual celebrations (ca. 485 B.C.), several decades after ritual songs had evolved into tragedy. Ritual was the key to all of it, at least initially. Masks such as that pictured above were worn, and a chorus burst into the proceedings at specific points to sing or chant an objective commentary upon the action.
The comedy of the Ancient Greeks is conventionally divided into three periods: Old Comedy, Middle Comedy and New Comedy. Scholars know about scores of ancient Greek playwrights, and the titles of hundreds of their plays, but we only have a handful of extant plays representing just a couple of Athenian playwrights from only two of the periods, though there is lots of commentary from ancient times, as well as fragments, translations, and other evidence which allow scholars to form a relatively clear picture of what it was all about.
The Old Comedy’s sole exemplar today is Aristophanes (c. 446-386). Because he is the West’s oldest surviving comic playwright he is sometimes called The Father of Comedy, but personally I world tweak that. I consider him the Father of Parody, Satire and Burlesque, the more intellectual comic forms. But comedy per se is quite a different thing, and we’ll return to that. Like Rabelais (whom he influenced) Aristophanes gets a shout out in my theme song! The Old Comedy is fascinating to contemplate. Part of a religious ritual, yet scatological and rude, full of topical humor at the expense of politicians, and the mocking of familiar myths and stories, and such like. Many of Aristophanes’ plays debuted in the middle of the Peloponnesian War; his anti-war themes make them evergreen. There were lots of productions of his plays in the U.S. during the Vietnam and Iraq Wars for example. 11 of his plays survive, around a quarter of his output. The best known might be Lysistrata, where the women go on a sex strike to make the men stop fighting — there have been adaptations by everyone from Gilbert Seldes to Sherwood Schwartz to Spike Lee to Douglas Carter Beane to my good friend Edward Einhorn. Others include The Frogs (made into a musical by Nathan Lane and Stephen Sondheim; and also adapted by the brilliant David Greenspan), The Clouds (which pokes fun at Socrates), The Birds, The Wasps, Peace, and Wealth. Most writers of a satirical bent are descendants of Aristophanes and the Old Comedy, among them Cervantes, Swift, Voltaire, and Henry Fielding. I would also strongly propound the idea that theatrical burlesque owes something to it as well, from Lydia Thompson, to Weber and Fields, to Mel Brooks.
We skip ahead now to the other pole, the New Comedy. This late phase gave us what most people are apt to regard as comedy per se, whether they have made distinctions in their head or not. Satires and parodies and burlesques like the Old Comedy are crazy and nonsensical. It’s not a mode where the audience is expected to really care what happens to the protagonist. Rom-coms, Shakespeare, screwball comedies, sit coms, and most funny movies that people watch? Those were in the vein of the Greek New Comedy. This era was roughly from 320-260 B.C. By this time the form had grown less ritualistic, the chorus was de-emphasized, and there was a cast of stock characters instead of focusing almost exclusively on a single main protagonist. Of the New Comedy, we have fewer extant examples, but paradoxically, more evidence. We have most of one play Dyskolos (The Grouch) by Menander (ca. 340-290), and lots of additional fragments by him and other authors. But there were lots of translations and adaptations of his works by the later Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence to add to the evidence, as well as the entire cast of character types that were conventional in ancient times, and then survived in the commedia dell’arte, and then made their way to the Renaissance playwrights. Such characters included pairs of young lovers, scheming servants, angry fathers, senescent old men, big hearted prostitutes, and so forth. Such satire as might be found in such plays would be broadly about the human condition, not directed at at any specific real-life individuals. This kind of comedy obviously is a hybridized, for it contains elements of drama, though not tragedy. We care and we worry, but nobody dies. The stakes are usually winning the girl or recovering lost money, or that sort of thing. Nobody stabs themselves in the eyes with a needle like Oedipus.
As you can see, we have a pretty strong sense about the Old and the New Comedy and their legacies. But of the so called Middle Comedy, we have almost nothing, just the names of plays and playwrights and the sense that it was a transitional time. That’s why I spoke of the Old and the New first. They are clear poles. The middle period was an era where the one transitioned to the other. There was no hard and fast division between these periods. In actuality it was a continuum, as opposed to three epochs with breaks between them.
As with the tragedies, I first read all of the Greek comedies when I was about 19. About a decade later I engaged in another period of research where I revisited those as well as the Roman and Renaissance comedies and made a careful study in preparation for some plays I wrote at the MacDowell Colony and Edward Albee’s writers barn in Montauk (this was in the mid ’90s). The plays that resulted from this period were House of Trash, which was presented at HERE Arts Center and the the now defunct NY Fringe Festival in 2000 and 2001 (with readings as early as 1995 — Andrea de Mateo of The Sopranos was in one!), as well as Kitsch, presented at Theater for the New City in 2009, and A House Divided, part of which was presented at Dixon Place in 2015.
Some related posts:
A post on modern Greeks in show business
(Travalanche) 
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