Aristophanic Humour

Theory and Practice

Peter Swallow, Edith Hall, Peter Swallow, Edith Hall

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350101548
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Drama
• Index: Literature

This volume sets out to discuss a crucial question for ancient comedy – what makes Aristophanes funny? Too often Aristophanes' humour is taken for granted as merely a tool for the delivery of political and social commentary. But Greek Old Comedy was above all else designed to amuse people, to win the dramatic competition by making the audience laugh the hardest. Any discussion of Aristophanes therefore needs to take into account the ways in which his humour actually works. This question is addressed in two ways. The first half of the volume offers an in-depth discussion of humour theory – a field heretofore largely overlooked by classicists and Aristophanists – examining various theoretical models within the specific context of Aristophanes' eleven extant plays. In the second half, contributors explore Aristophanic humour more practically, examining how specific linguistic techniques and performative choices affect the reception of humour, and exploring the range of subjects Aristophanes tackles as vectors for his comedy. A focus on performance shapes the narrative, since humour lives or dies on the stage – it is never wholly comprehensible on the page alone.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: DISSECTING THE FROG(S)

Peter Swallow

The American writer and humourist E. B. White once observed that ‘humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind’.¹ In his book on the metatheatre of Aristophanes, Slater likewise cautions against over-analysing comedy for humour’s sake:

Comedy is notoriously difficult to study and analyze. The creation of taxonomies of jokes or comic techniques risks destroying the very subject it studies, eliminating any sense of what is really funny or creative through the atomization of the dramatic experience into a series of lifeless specimens, pinned onto the collector’s display board.²

This volume provocatively proposes to disprove such criticisms – or at least to circumvent them. It proposes to take a scalpel to Aristophanes and pin his jokes to the collector’s board, not for the purpose of killing the frog but to dissect it and see how it works. Humour, after all, is not only another feature, but the defining feature of Old Comedy (else it would self-evidently not be comedy); to decide electively not to examine it is short-sighted. The fundamental, guiding question we ask of Aristophanes in this volume is also the fundamental question we should always ask of Aristophanes, or of any comedy or satire: why are you funny? Because the answer to that fundamental question, as this volume will also demonstrate, can have huge ramifications for how we interpret everything else Aristophanes does.

This may prove a hard task – as we will shortly see, there is as yet no universal humour theory that can perfectly and flawlessly account for what makes something funny and what does not – but that does not make the need to pursue the task any less pressing. And theorists have been thinking about what makes people laugh since Plato (ironic, given the general absence of humour theory from classics), so there is a basis on which we can build. Before turning to an overview of the papers included in this volume, the present introduction will provide a brief overview of the various schools of humour theory which have developed – though I emphasize here that this is only an introduction to the theory, designed for readers who may be otherwise unfamiliar with the subject.

And what if, in our over-zealousness to analyse that which we should not, we destroy Aristophanic humour? Well, it is not necessarily the academic’s job to preserve the humour of a text if doing so prevents inquiry. A detailed philological reading of Medea may likewise run the risk of dimming the affective tragic power of Euripides’ drama under the weight of scholarship, but nobody would seriously suggest that philologists should therefore stay away from tragedy. And there is every chance that an understanding of how Aristophanes’ humour works may make our laughter even louder. My favourite joke in the Aristophanic corpus is from The Wasps:

κελητίσαι ’κέλευον, ὀξυθυμηθεῖσά μοι

ἤρετ’ εἰ τὴν Ἱππίου καθίσταμαι τυραννίδα.

I told her to ride me; she got angry and asked me if I was putting Hippias back in the saddle [lit. establishing Hippias’ tyranny].

Wasps 501f.³

When I first read this as a schoolboy – in fact it was one of my lines in a performance of the play – I did not find it funny. I didn’t know who Hippias was, so while I got the double entendre, the pun on a tyrant’s name and the surrounding political context of the joke was lost on me. Then the director explained it to me, and I laughed. I still laugh whenever I think of it – or at least smile with appreciation at the (rather crude) wit. Explaining the humour allowed me to see what Aristophanes was doing – to analyse the (rather complex, multi-layered, context-dependent) joke. In fact, even the most basic humour is inherently complicated; as John Morreall has pointed out, to appreciate comedy (and he is specifically talking about Aristophanes here) ‘involves higher-order thinking, especially seeing things from multiple perspectives. To get even simple jokes requires that we have two interpretations for a phrase in mind at the same time.’⁴ Whenever we hear a joke, we effectively dissect it to see how it works: if we ‘get’ it, we might laugh; if we don’t ‘get’ it and can’t work out how it works, we probably won’t. The purpose of this volume is not necessarily to make its readers chuckle, but if we can draw attention to some of Aristophanes’ genius and raise a laugh along the way, then all the better.

So there we have it. Scalpels at the ready – let’s dissect some Frogs.

Theories of humour

Laughter as a physical reaction may have originated in the ‘open-mouth display’ observed in many mammals.⁵ The display of a relaxed mouth, with gums and teeth withdrawn, appears to indicate passivity without intent to attack in many mammals. Smiling, conversely, may be a manifestation of the ‘bared teeth display’ ‘shown by a subordinate to a dominant, a nervous signal of submissiveness common in many species, including many parts of the primate line.’⁶ The Play Theory of humour associated with the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga in his influential Homo Ludens (1938) draws from such observations of animal behaviour the idea that laughter developed as a social indicator to make clear that playing and joking were not to be taken as hostile acts. Since play activities have been observed in a number of species, they must have some adaptive benefit; evolutionists have suggested play is used to prepare safely for dangerous scenarios and to build sociality. This social function may also be broadly the ‘meaning’ of the personified figure of ‘Play’ (Paidiá) appearing on some Attic vases contemporary with Aristophanes, and of the constructive recreational activities (paidiaí) described in Plato’s Laws as distinctive to peacetime social life (7.803c).⁷ Indeed, one study has found that laughter is ‘over 30 times as likely to be performed by subjects in social than in solitary settings’ when not stimulated by media.⁸ Of course, humour and laughter can be, and often are, targeted and aggressive, but, as Aristophanes shows, there is no easier way to build social cohesion than by sharing a joke about a common enemy. ‘The basic ability to perceive humor seems “instinctive”’⁹ and ‘people of all ages and cultures experience humour in their daily conversation, observation, and imagination’,¹⁰ so it seems reasonable to seek an evolutionary explanation.

There is an important distinction to make here between laughter and humour. Laughter is a physiological response which may indicate the experience of humour, but does not necessarily – we also laugh when we are awkward, or very upset, or pretending, or are on laughing gas.¹¹ In fact, when we laugh, it is quite rarely because we find something funny.¹² Theories of humour typically struggle to account for tickling precisely because the laughter it induces is a response to a physical stimulus, not a response to humour (but tickling may be connected to play).¹³ Likewise, humour can be experienced without laughter, which is, as we have said, a largely social, group-centred act. This is why the present volume is focusing on humour rather than laughter – it is focused on the stimulus rather than the perceived reception indicated by physical response. Evolutionary explanations of laughter can tell us much about the social function of humour, but may not fully illuminate how humour works in itself.

The Superiority Theory of humour assumes that amusement is derived from the receivers’ sense of superiority over the target of the joke. Thomas Hobbes set this out in his political work Leviathan, in which he connected humour with a misplaced sense of ‘glory’:

Sudden Glory, is the passion which maketh those Grimaces called LAUGHTER; and is caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves. And it is incident most to them, that are conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves; who are forced to keep themselves in their own favour, by observing the imperfections of other men. And therefore much Laughter at the defects of others, is a signe of Pusillanimity. For of great minds, one of the proper workes is, to help and free others from scorn; and compare themselves onely with the most able.¹⁴

The theory’s roots lie with Plato. In the Philebus, he argues that humour derives from ridiculing the flaws of the target, and as such is inherently hostile; ‘γελῶντας ἄρα ἡμᾶς ἐπὶ τοῖς τῶν ϕίλων γελοίοις ϕησὶν ὁ λόγος, κεραννύντας ἡδονὴν αὖ ϕθόνῳ, λύπῃ τὴν ἡδονὴν συγκεραννύναι’ (‘when we laugh at our friends’ absurdities and mix pleasure with envy, we mix up pleasure with pain’, 50a). Aristotle also defined comedy as the ‘μίμησις ϕαυλοτέρων’ (the ‘mimesis of baser people’, Poetics 1449a), although without the caveat that the comic individual is usually just as flawed as their target – for Aristotle, comedy in its narrow sense as theatrical performance is a positive force. (We must remember that we do not have access to his fuller analysis of the telos of comedy, which was in the part of his Poetics we have lost.)¹⁵ Plato and Hobbes both disdain laughter, but Aristotle asserts that it can be ‘ἀνώδυνον καὶ οὐ ϕθαρτικόν’ (‘harmless and non-destructive’, Poetics 1449a).¹⁶ Superiority Theory may explain the aischrology so central to the humour of Old Comedy, offensive language which operates ‘as a powerful medium of public ridicule and humiliation’.¹⁷

In 1709, Lord Shaftesbury published An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, in which he went several steps further than the acknowledgement of the physiological benefits of laughter to be found in ancient medical ideas of Aristotle, Galen and the Hippocratic corpus,¹⁸ by theorizing that humour had a biological function as a physical relief mechanism for bodily fluids and gases.¹⁹ Sigmund Freud later picked up on this concept and reformulated it into a Relief Theory of humour. For Freud, humour creates pleasure by economizing on mental energy, whether that energy is spent on suppressing negative mental thoughts or on maintaining rationality;²⁰ ‘laughter arises when an amount of psychical energy previously used in charging certain psychical pathways has become unusable, so that it can be freely released’.²¹ This theory may account well for our fascination with taboo humour on sexual or violent themes, a form of comedy familiar to Aristophanists.

The most popular account for humour today is the Incongruity Theory. There are numerous...