This is the first book exclusively dedicated to jokes in ancient Greek comedy, and it builds upon the last few decades of research into concepts like humor (Ruffell 2011, Swallow and Hall 2020),[1] parody (Farmer 2017, Sells 2018, Jendza 2020a),[2] nonsense (Kidd 2014),[3] play (Kidd 2019),[4] surprise (Kanellakis 2020),[5] and metatheatre (Slater 2002).[6] While this previous work dealt with jokes in some capacity, Scott’s focus and main contention here is that “jokes in Greek comedy are a critical site of engagement with the language and convention of poetic representation” (p. 2). This is quite intuitive; after all, the world depicted in poetry—and especially tragedy—is very different than our normal reality, and Scott argues that comedy frequently creates jokes by exploiting the gaps between poetic representation and more standard kinds of representation. According to Scott, this happens because jokes and poetry are contiguous forms of speech, that is, they are both modes of utterance that set out to flout the rules of ordinary speech. It is well-known that humor flouts the standards of normal human conversation (Robson 2006, Jendza 2020b),[7] as does poetry, but Scott’s juxtaposition of the two is very thought-provoking, especially with the idea that jokes and poetry are contiguous. The introduction discusses the incongruity theory of humor, touching on theorists from Aristotle, Kant, and Schopenhauer, to Raskin, Attardo, and Oring. The book’s three chapters each deal with a particular cluster of jokes relating to poetic imagery/language, performance, and plot.
Chapter 1, “Playing with Words: Jokes and Poetic Language” explores how comedy engages with two kinds of poetic linguistic representation—metaphor and ekphrasis—both of which have a distinct visual quality to them. Metaphors and jokes both work by taking two disparate ideas and mapping them onto each other. Scott begins with the speech-as-liquid metaphor, seen in poetry as early as Nestor’s flowing honey-sweet speech in Iliad 1. Comedy exploits the inherent gap in such metaphors between the abstract and the concrete. In Knights, Aristophanes characterizes his competitor Cratinus’s poetry, and even the person Cratinus himself, as a rushing torrent; Cratinus responds in Pytine by amplifying the words-as-liquid metaphor, stretching it to the point of comic absurdity. In Cratinus’s hands, Scott writes, “the metaphor assumes a joke-like quality” (p. 28). Given the similarity between the two concepts of joke and metaphor, I would have liked to see definitions of these terms or at least some means of differentiating between them—is Cratinus still employing a metaphor or has it become a joke? The phrase “joke-like metaphor” leads me to think it’s still a metaphor, albeit one somehow more like a joke; I would have loved to see these intricacies explained further here (on this issue see Scott 2019).[8] Some of the metaphors discussed in this chapter are very interesting—the line “he has the face of a shrimp like a leather thong” (Cratinus fr. 314/Eupolis fr. 120) has a double metaphor (“his face” ~ “shrimp” ~ “leather thong”) with further sexual connotations (“shrimp” ~ “phallus”, which combined with the reference to leather perhaps evokes the comic phallus, p. 29–30). Scott’s method of unpacking the different levels of humor in jokes like this is strong. Ekphrases, vivid descriptions that bring the subject matter before the eyes of the listener, are also sources of humor, and Scott focuses on the fantastic Golden Age landscapes that permeate comedy. While tragedy’s imaginary poetic spaces create the illusion of “thereness”, comedy’s ekphrastic landscapes move into the absurd and the impossible, deliberately rejecting a sense of “thereness”. In Pherecrates’s Miners, the underworld landscape becomes edible, with sausages and blood pudding being poured out and sizzling on the riverbanks (fr. 113.8–9); in Crates’s Wild Beasts, a kitchen operates of its own accord; and in Aristophanes’s Birds, the imaginary Cloudcuckooland is created and the world transformed via a pun on polos “celestial sphere”/polis “city”. Comedy’s metaphors and ekphrases find the absurdities inherent in poetic modes of representation and then amplify them to the point of ridiculousness.
Chapter 2, “Playing with Theatre: Jokes and Dramatic Performance” looks at how comedy engages with the “inherent absurdity of theatrical make-believe” (p. 57). Scott begins with puns involving non-human characters, which have a built-in incongruity based on a dual identity—the non-human body of the fictional character layered atop the human body of the actor. Archippus’s Fishes highlights the theatrical problems of fish with feet; Aristophanes’s Acharnians uses a sexual pun to explore the dual identity of the piglet-girls; Eupolis’s Cities shows the collision between the abstract and the concrete when humans represent cities; and Aristophanes’s Wasps exploits a pun on oxus (“stinger”/“harsh temperament”) to help characterize the chorus of citizen-wasps. One question I had here was how we are to evaluate the quality of ancient puns. Scott claims that Archippus’s jokes are groan-inducing since “they rely not so much on true double meanings as on words which almost, but not completely, sound alike” (p. 63). But Aristophanes’s pun on polos/polis (Birds 180–4) doesn’t get the same value judgment and is instead presented as an important means of creating the play’s fictional world, not as a groaner. The second half of the chapter shows how Aristophanes, Strattis, and Antiphanes mock how tragedy uses the theatrical devices of the mechane and the eccyclema. Again, the point is that these jokes pick apart the relationship between the tragic representation of a thing and the thing itself, calling attention to the limitations of tragic representation in practice.
Chapter 3, “Playing with Plot: Jokes and Storytelling” turns its attention to plots. Aristotle famously says that the best plots are the ones with unity of action, a system of narrative causality whereby one thing leads to the next. The serious genres of epic, tragedy, and historiography are concerned with such causal plotlines, but comic plots mock this, instead showing how jokes offer an alternative narrative model that is both more absurd and more naturalistic than those seen in the serious narrative traditions. Scott begins with plotlines that have built-in incongruities—plays whose titles blend two elements or who have characters that impersonate someone else. In these cases, it’s typical for at least one of the two elements or characters to be mythological, which gives a comic benefit, offering a set of stable associations that can be subverted. For example, Aristophanes’s Aeolosicon (blending the god of the winds Aeolus and the chef Sicon) contrasts the high, the fantastical, and the mythical with the low, the realist, and the quotidian. The next examples deal with comic aetiologies of the Trojan War. Aristophanes’s Daedalus and Cratinus’s Nemesis tell alternative stories about Helen’s conception than those seen in the mythological tradition, and since these rely on an act of impersonation (Zeus as a bird), there is a built-in incongruity upon which to base the comic plot. Cratinus’s Dionysalexandros similarly builds multiple identities for its protagonist (Dionysus, Paris, Pericles, and even a sheep) and moves the traditional order of events away from linear causality towards a more disorderly arrangement of events. Thus, there are two ways of understanding narrative causality, and Cratinus’s comedy suggests that the “anarchic anti-aetiologies of comedy” (p. 104) are the best lens through which to understand the world.
The brief closing section “Conclusions: Comedy and the Avant-Garde in the Fifth Century and Beyond” explores how comedy relates to the intellectual innovations of the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE, especially the New Music of Timotheus. Some of Timotheus’s poetry uses metaphorical language similar to the metaphor-jokes analyzed in Chapter 1; thus, comedy was an “active participant in the creative environment that nurtured the experimentalism of the New Music” (p. 119). This is careful phrasing, leaving it open as to the extent or the directionality of the influence between the New Music and comedy; regardless, the parallels in metaphorical language are clear.
The parts of the book I enjoyed most were the close readings of the jokes. Very often Scott shows how an initial baseline incongruity in a comic scene sets up further incongruous puns or related jokes, and we end up with two (or three, or four) ways of interpreting and understanding the joke. A strength of the book is that it puts the fragmentary comedians on equal footing with Aristophanes; I loved how a discussion of less familiar jokes from Archippus, Eupolis, and Pherecrates can help us look at more canonical scenes in Aristophanes in a new light. I also liked the focus on how comedy engages with poetic representation, since this is an important aspect of comic poetics. This framework certainly overlaps with concepts like paratragedy, but it’s not exactly the same, or rather, it extends the discussion away from the parody of specific scenes (e.g., Aristophanes’s Peace parodying Euripides’s Bellerophon) to include parody of the nature of poetic and tragic mimesis itself.
This book is a substantial revision of a dissertation completed in 2016; however, I would have liked to have seen more engagement with recent scholarship on similar topics. Two works that come to mind are D. Kanellakis’s (2020) Aristophanes and the Poetics of Surprise, which discusses jokes, metaphors, and comedy’s appropriation of mythological narratives, and P. Swallow and E. Hall’s (2020) edited volume Aristophanic Humour: Theory and Practice, which has various articles on jokes, incongruities, parody, and humor. But Scott’s book fits in nicely alongside these—every interpretation is sensible and shows good judgment, and the author’s passion for ancient Greek jokes (even the groaners) shines through. This book makes a strong contribution to the study of humor in ancient Greek comedy, and I recommend it to anyone interested in jokes, humor, parody, poetics and the like in Aristophanes and the fragmentary comic poets.
Notes
[1] Ruffell, I. A. (2011), Politics and Anti-Realism in Athenian Old Comedy (Oxford); Swallow, P. and E. Hall (eds). (2020), Aristophanic Humour: Theory and Practice (Bloomsbury).
[2] Farmer, M. (2017), Tragedy on the Comic Stage (Oxford); Sells, D. (2018), Parody, Politics and the Populace in Greek Old Comedy (Bloomsbury); Jendza, C. (2020a), Paracomedy: Appropriations of Comedy in Greek Tragedy (Oxford).
[3] Kidd, S. (2014), Nonsense and Meaning in Ancient Greek Comedy (Cambridge).
[4] Kidd, S. (2019), Play and Aesthetics in Ancient Greece (Cambridge).
[5] Kanellakis, D. (2020), Aristophanes and the Poetics of Surprise (De Gruyter).
[6] Slater, N. (2002), Spectator Politics: Metatheatre and Performance in Aristophanes (University of Pennsylvania Press).
[7] Robson, J. (2006), Humour, Obscenity and Aristophanes (Gunter Narr Verlag); Jendza, C. (2020b), “Aristophanic Incongruities”, in Swallow, P. and E. Hall (eds), Aristophanic Humour: Theory and Practice (Bloomsbury).
[8] Scott, N. (2019), “Metaphors and Jokes in the Fragments of Cratinus”, Arethusa 52 (3): 231–51.