Who" Invented" Comedy? The Ancient Candidates for the Origins of Comedy and the Visual Evidence (original) (raw)
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"Aristotle on the origins of Comedy", Logeion 13 (2023) 103-139.
Aristotle formulates two complementary theses (a ritual and a grammatological one) on the provenance of comic drama; both were forecast by the comic playwrights of the fifth century. On one hand, comedy is said to have originated from the leaders of phallic processions (Poet. 4.1449a 10‒13), a type of ceremony attested for Attica and other areas of Greece by philological and archaeological evidence. Already in Aristophanes’ Acharnians (241‒79), the main hero’s phallic festival represents a small-scale “proto-comedy”, by means of which the celebration of peace is set up as a kind of regress to the ultimate roots of the comic spectacle. Apart from the comic actors’ phallic costume, which was declining in Aristotle’s time, the aforementioned theory was chiefly inspired by a consciousness of the deeper phallic nature of comic drama, which traditionally ends with the hero’s sexual triumph. On the other hand, Aristotle holds up iambic poetry as a grammatological and thematic precursor of comedy (Poet. 4.1448b 20‒1449a 6). Comic writers such as Cratinus and Aristophanes had exploited the same idea to fashion entire episodes of their plays (the finale of the Peace, Cratinus’ Archilochoi). It is likely that fifth-century sophists and intellectuals had discussed these issues, and their opinions may have motivated the comic poets’ phantasmagorical creations.
This chapter seeks out the evidence for the time and context of the first performances of choral entertainments and the first performances of comedy at the Athenian Dionysia. This is a muchdiscussed question and requires the clearing away of more than one misconception, but I present the evidence as we go along. The main conclusion is a simple one: 'comedy' as we know it, requires the performance conditions that can only be offered by a theatre, and the Theatre of Dionysos, built ca. 500 BC, was the first in Athens to provide these conditions. Attic comedy did not, however, spring out of nothing: much of Attic comedy's distinctive form and character is owed to the Dionysian entertainments that existed before the construction of the Theatre.
The Reflection Of Ancient Greek And Roman Theaters In Today's Culture Of Humor 1 Tahsin Emre FIRAT
International Journal of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences Studies, 2020
Today's humor culture substantially originates from theatrical genres which had displayed during the ancient period. Tragedy, comedy and satire examples which had come to the forefront in the Roman and Greek cultures during the ancient era give clues about the cultural structure of the era. These theatrical genres containing solemnity, satire, sarcasm and irony reflect tragic and humorous elements of the Ancient Roman and Greek culture. Fabula Crepidata / tragoedia, Fabula Praetexta (ta), Fabula Palliata /comoedia, Fabula Togata / tabernaria, Fabula Atellana, Mimus / planipes and Pantomimus are among the examples of the Ancient Roman and Greek theatrical culture. This study which will examine the aforementioned theatrical genres of the ancient period consists of a literature review. This study investigates the above-mentioned theatrical genres and their relation to today's culture of humor, with a focus on the historical transformation of performance-based culture of humor.
A Brief History of Athenian Political Comedy (c. 440–c. 300)
Transactions of the American Philological Association, 2013
This paper reassesses the production-pattern of politically engaged comedy of the Aristophanic type, traditionally considered the hallmark of the Old Comic period, in light of recent work on the comic fragments, and finds that such plays were relatively infrequent, produced only when demagogues were ascendant by poets who opposed them, and that this pattern seems to hold for the fourth century as well.