Aristophanes was an Ancient Greek comic playwright from Athens and a poet of Old Attic Comedy. He wrote in total forty plays, of which eleven survive virtually complete today. These provide the most valuable examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy and are used to define it, along with fragments from dozens of lost plays by Aristophanes and his contemporaries.
Bust of Aristophanes (1st century AD)
Theatre of Dionysus, Athens – in Aristophanes' time, the audience probably sat on wooden benches with earth foundations.
Muse reading, Louvre
Thalia, muse of comedy, gazing upon a comic mask (detail from Muses' Sarcophagus)
Comedy is a genre of fiction that consists of discourses or works intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, film, stand-up comedy, television, radio, books, or any other entertainment medium. The term originated in ancient Greece: In Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was influenced by political satire performed by comic poets in theaters. The theatrical genre of Greek comedy can be described as a dramatic performance pitting two groups, ages, genders, or societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict. Northrop Frye depicted these two opposing sides as a "Society of Youth" and a "Society of the Old". A revised view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a relatively powerless youth and the societal conventions posing obstacles to his hopes. In this struggle, the youth then becomes constrained by his lack of social authority, and is left with little choice but to resort to ruses which engender dramatic irony, which provokes laughter.
Tragic Comic Masks of Ancient Greek Theatre represented in the Hadrian's Villa mosaic
Roman-era mosaic depicting a scene from Menander's comedy Samia ("The Woman from Samos")
Title page of the first quarto of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream (1600)
Edward Lear, Aged 73 and a Half and His Cat Foss, Aged 16, an 1885 lithograph by Edward Lear