Were these ancient Greek comedies, such an integral part of early Western civilization as they were, funny? Were they full of sight gags, one-liners, rimshots, etc.? Did the audience laugh? If my local playhouse put one on next season (translated into English, natch), would the audience get it?
ARISTOPHANES (to audience): I was in Ephesus the ohter day, and it was SOOOOOO hot…
AUDIENCE: 
ARISTOPHANES: I said, I was in Ephesus the ohter day, and it was SOOOOOO hot…
AUDIENCE: How hot was it?
ARISTOPHANES: It was so hot I saw a dog chasing a cat, and they were both walking. :: rimshot ::
Also, how did Socrates pronounce his name? I’ve always pronounced, and heard in pronounced, as “SOCK-ruh-tease.” In Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, the guy playing Socrates pronounces it “So-CRAH-tees.” Any idea how the ancient Greeks would have pronounced it?
When I was in Parochial (ie: Catholic) school, the nuns told us that the Greek Comedies weren’t really funny. They just had happy endings.
I am happy to report that the nuns were wrong. The Greek comedies were funny. Most of them were downright risque (which might explain the nuns’ attitude). Socrates was said to have laughed the hardest at the portrayal of him in Aristophanes’ “The Clouds”. I’ve always suspected that story was either apocryphal or PR, but the point is that he was expected to laugh. Greek comedy was slap-your-knees funny.
Of course, it doesn’t always work that way in translation. Lenny Bruce’s material died in court when the judge was reading it. Get yourself a good translation and you’ll see.
Well, my 2 drachmata…
I have a book with four of Aristophanes’ plays in them, at least one of which is a comedy (been a while since I read it). I forget if Cloud Cuckoo-Land was the title or one of the main subjects of this particular play, however. It had a handful of sexual innuendos, plenty of silly characters personified by birds, and other elements that would have made it funny even to our modern tastes, although there probably would have to be lots of explanation as well.
Presumably, this was the highbrow form of comedy back in the day, which leads me to conjecture that the lowbrow stuff might have been on the level of “Jackass”. Plus ça change…
As for how Socrates pronounced his own name: given that the modern Greek pronunciation is the same as the way it was pronounced in Bill & Ted, I strongly suspect it really hasn’t changed that much over ~2,500 years.
Where the hell is Maeglin when you need him?
Well, technically, CalMeacham’s nuns were right: a comedy is a drama with a happy ending. (The definition was also adopted by Victor Borge, who offered the following advice on how to tell if an opera is a comedy or a tragedy, “Look at the stage just before the final curtain. If anyone’s still standing, it was a comedy.”)
But, as Cal rightly observes, comedy (in the dramatic sense) can also be comedy (in the “it’s funny” sense). And, in the case of Aristophanes, very often is. The comic value of Lysistrata, for instance, should be apparent even to the jaded 21st century Americans on this board. (I shudder to think what the nuns would say about it, though.)
It’s all in how you present it, and how it’s acted.
When ANY play that’s more than a few centuries old is performed, there’s a danger that the audience won’t understand it, or even that the ACTORS don’t really get it. I’ve sat through productions of Shakespeare comedies in which it was obvious that the actors themselves had memorized lines without really understanding them, and the effect is numbing. Hence, a high school or community college production of, say, “Much Ado About Nothing,” is likely to be not only unfunny but PAINFUL.
But for illustration, watch the vdeo of Kenneth Branagh’s production of “Much Ado,” and you’ll notice a great difference in talent among the actors in the cast. When Branagh, Emma Thompson, or even Denzel Washington says a line in Elizabethan English, it’s hilarious. You actually understand every word because the ACTORS make the language seem natural. But much of the cast (Keanu Reeves and Robert Sean Leonard, especially) is so stiff, so incapable of understanding wha tthey’re saying, that they make little sense.
So it can be with modern productions of Greek or Roman plays. Bad actors in bad productions make the funniest OR most tragic Greek play seem like slow torture. But people who understand what the whole thing is about can be HILARIOUS.
Aristophanes’ plays are a lot like Monty Python sketches in this sense: they combine the cerebral and the silly. “The Clouds” has loads of intellectual jokes AND lots of fart humor. When his plays are done right, they’re side-splittingly funny even now. But if they’re presented as cultural spinach ("it’s CULTURE, it’s GOOD for you!), you’ll be bored stiff.
Slight (I hope) nitpick: when you’re talking abour Aristophanes (as in The Clouds or The Birds [not to be confused with Hitchcock’s version]), what you’re describing is farce. The Greeks made a distinction between comedy–which, like tragedy, often had a “moral,” but didn’t beat you over the head with it–and farce, which was somewhat analogous to today’s sitcoms. Farce may or may not have a “message” (The Clouds, for example, was a satire on the philosophers), but its main objective was enjoyment.
Steve Wright, The Lysistrata is what the nuns taught as “female empowerment.”
When I was in a high school English class, the teacher assigned a section of Aristophanes’ The Frogs to be read aloud in class. She picked different show-offs for the lead characters, and the rest of the class was the chorus. And off we went.
We could barely get through it, we were laughing so hard. When we got into the irresistible rhythm of the piece, with the chorus, all frogs, punching the beat out with “croax, croax”, it was hysterical. I don’t think anyone in that class forgot that moment, and I’m pretty sure most of them checked out the whole play soon thereafter.
So, yeah. They were funny. But scripts aren’t plays; they just lie there until someone picks them up and gives them life.
The ancient Greeks didn’t use the term comedy in the sense that we do, although things we call comedy, they would be likely to, also.
This site explains fairly clearly.
Of course, in MrVisible’s hands, even tragedy can be rewritten to be comedy…
There were two types of comedies. There was a drama festival in Athens each year that celebrated Dionysius. (The festival was also a competition, and Sophocles won often.) Each day for three days, three tragedies were performed, and the day ended with a Satyr play, a sort of lowbrow mocking of the day’s festivities. Hence our word, “satire.” To my knowledge, no Sartyr plays remain to us, but we do know they existed from descriptions of the festival. The Satyr plays were written by the playwright featured on that day.
There was also a comedy festival called Lenaea held in the winter. This is where the comedies which remain to us were performed. Some of these plays, I think for example, The Clouds, openly mock the serious playwrights (Euripedes was portrayed quite humorously in that IIRC). They are very funny if you are aware of the serious playwright’s work – there are some “in” jokes. There is also your usual assortment of madcap situations and humorous solutions to problems, with perhaps a touch of the social commentary. This festival was also a competition. Aristophanes won often.
So, the Greeks had two kinds of comedy: Satyr play, basically slapstick and broad humor from what I understand, and Comedy, which was still pretty funny but usually more intellectual.
I forgot to add: “The Lysistrata” is probably the most popular and accessible of greek comedies. (Plot: The women of Athens get sick of the Peloponesian (sp?) War – and refuse to have sex with the men until they quit fighting. Hilarity ensues.)
When well acted, people tend to think it is very funny. The two themes (battle of the sexes/social commentary on uselesness of war) are pretty universally understood to this day.
It was updated into the play “Love’s Labours Lost” by one Wm. Shakespeare.
Interesting thread. A good friend of mine is working on a translation of Aristophanes right now. He said that while translating the words is relatively easy, getting at the meaning was fairly difficult. Much of the humor is topical, so unless you’ve got a handle on who’s who and what’s what in ancient Greece, it’s going to go right over your head. Likewise, there are plenty of dirty jokes that just don’t translate well. My friend was telling me how pleased he was when he figured out that “filling your oil lamp” (or some such, I can’t remember it exactly) was a sexual innuendo.
What, hadn’t he ever heard of “dipping your wick”?
Kids these days. Sheesh.