Old Comedy is the first period of the ancient Greek comedy, according to the canonical division by the Alexandrian grammarians. The most important Old Comic playwright is Aristophanes – whose works, with their daring political commentary and abundance of sexual innuendo, de facto define the genre. It is important to note that the only extant plays of Old Comedy are credited to Aristophanes. There are only fragments and 'testimonia' of all other Old Comedy playwrights and plays.
Thalia, muse of comedy, gazing upon a comic mask (detail from Muses' Sarcophagus)
Ancient Greek comedy was one of the final three principal dramatic forms in the theatre of classical Greece. Athenian comedy is conventionally divided into three periods: Old Comedy, Middle Comedy, and New Comedy. Old Comedy survives today largely in the form of the eleven surviving plays of Aristophanes; Middle Comedy is largely lost, i.e. preserved only in relatively short fragments by authors such as Athenaeus of Naucratis; and New Comedy is known primarily from the substantial papyrus fragments of Menander.
Actor on a Sicilian red-figured calyx-krater (c. 350–340 BC).
Terracotta comic theatre mask, 4th/3rd century BC (Stoa of Attalus, Athens)
Marble image of a theatre mask, 2nd-century BC.
An actor in the mask of a bald man, 2nd century BC