Aristophanes – Comedy & political satire

He stands at the rowdy heart of a city that let citizens vote on everything and then trusted a poet to walk onstage with a phallus, a chorus of birds or wasps or frogs, a sack of insults, and the kind of license kings fear. If tragedy is the public ritual that teaches a people how to suffer with dignity, his comedy is the public mischief that teaches them how to blush, howl, and—when needed—change their minds. Aristophanes does not write jokes around politics; he writes politics through jokes. He is the dramatist of a democracy’s nervous system, testing reflexes, jabbing pressure points, making the body politic jump so it can locate its pain. He names names, sues reputations, drags fashionable slogans through mud until the polish comes off and the wood grain of reality shows. When the war runs too long, he stages a farmer who just wants to plow in peace and flies him to heaven on a dung beetle to negotiate a treaty with the personified goddess Peace. When demagogues fatten themselves on panic, he unleashes a sausage-seller to chase a leather-dealer off the political stage and restore some plain sense to the council. When clever men build a tower of words and call it wisdom, he draws a ladder to a cloud-house and shows them living there, thin on food and rich in air. When the city is so addicted to lawsuits that jurors are like wasps who sting for sport, he puts the old stingers in costumes with stripes and teaches them to laugh at themselves until the venom drains. He is obscene because the city is biological; he is musical because laughter needs a tune; he is topical because the polis is a person with a daily headache; he is fantastical because, under pressure, fantasy is the only test strong enough to snap a false idea clean.

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