Aristophanes – Comedy & political satire

He stands at the rowdy heart of a city that let citizens vote on everything and then trusted a poet to walk onstage with a phallus, a chorus of birds or wasps or frogs, a sack of insults, and the kind of license kings fear. If tragedy is the public ritual that teaches a people how to suffer with dignity, his comedy is the public mischief that teaches them how to blush, howl, and—when needed—change their minds. Aristophanes does not write jokes around politics; he writes politics through jokes. He is the dramatist of a democracy’s nervous system, testing reflexes, jabbing pressure points, making the body politic jump so it can locate its pain. He names names, sues reputations, drags fashionable slogans through mud until the polish comes off and the wood grain of reality shows. When the war runs to ...