Old Comedy

Old Comedy, term used to distinguish the early comedy of ancient Greece—specifically of Athens in its prime—from its subsequent development into Middle Comedy and New Comedy. (See COMEDY for comedy in the modern sense.) It had a much stricter and more complex form than Attic tragedy, though it too was a blend of the choral and the histrionic. The name ‘comedy’ is derived from komos and ode, meaning a ‘revel song’. One form of revel was associated with fertility rites: it was a mixture of singing, dancing, scurrilous jesting against bystanders, and ribaldry; Aristotle derives comedy from this, and certainly comedy contained all these elements, including the use of the phallus, the symbol of fertility. Another form of komos, well represented on vasepaintings, was the Masquerade, in which revellers disguised themselves as animals or birds. Since the comic chorus was often of this type (as in the Wasps, Birds, and Frogs of Aristophanes) the influence of this kind of revel on comedy seems clear enough. Old Comedy (represented now only by Aristophanes) is the most local form of drama that has ever reached literary rank. It was a sort of national lampoon, in which anything prominent in the life of the city, whether persons or ideas, was unsparingly ridiculed—a unique mixture of fantasy, criticism, wit, burlesque, obscenity, parody, invective, and exquisite lyricism. The atmosphere of the whole is well suggested by the story that during the performance of Aristophanes' Clouds Socrates rose from his seat to give the audience an opportunity of comparing the mask of the stage Socrates with the man himself.

In the late 18th and 19th centuries the term Old Comedy was used in Britain, and more particularly in North America, to denote the repertory of comedies from Shakespeare to Sheridan.