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The Edithorial
Saturday, 30 May 2015
Comedy's 2,500th Birthday
This week has been all
about comedy. On
Wednesday I spent my
birthday present money
rediscovering the
therapeutic power of
laughter at the musical
Book of Mormon. My rib‐
cage ached and my mascara ran after two straight hours of
hilarity.
The work is a trenchant satire on imperialism. Its climax—the
Ugandan villagers’ riotously obscene musical‐pageant reprise of the
Mormon foundation story, complete with artificial phalluses and
frog‐shagging—is the nearest thing any of us will ever experience to
Greek Old Comedy. This is not surprising, given that Trey Parker (of
South Park), one of Book of Mormon’s creators, has previously
milked an ancient Greek text, the Odyssey, in his cultish Cannibal:
the Musical!
And I’ve achieved a long‐held ambition by
making it onto the cover of the June issue of
the admirable magazine History Today with
an article about the birthday of comedy. It
was exactly 2,500 years ago, in 486 BCE, that
comic theatre was born when it was
integrated, for the very first time, in the
drama competitions of the democratic Athenian state. In an
outdoor theatre in the sanctuary of the wine‐god Dionysus, a
musical chorus of men dressed in obscene costumes accompanied
knockabout actors who yelled versified abuse at an audience of
tipsy citizens.
Supremely Aristophanic 'Joseph Smith, American Moses' number
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The inventor of comic
theatre was a man called
Sousarion. The prize for the
best comedy in that first
competition was a basket of
figs and no fewer than forty
litres of wine. The actors
will have worked up a thirst
mocking anybody who ‘put
their head about the
parapet’ in public life. They talked freely about sleaze, corruption,
and personal toilet habits. They subjected gods and powerful
humans to trial by vitriolic laughter which makes most modern
equivalents—Private Eye, Spitting Image, Not the Nine O’clock
News—look half‐hearted in comparison. Eleven Athenian
democratic comedies survive, all by one dramatist, Aristophanes.
In 486 BC, when
that epoch‐
making first
competition in
comic theatre
was held, a
comic attitude
to life was of
course not new.
The ancient
Greeks were cracking jokes from the first minute in history when
we can hear their voices: the Cretans who lived in Bronze‐Age
Knossos must have had their tongues in their Mycenaean cheeks
when their called their ploughing cows ‘Nimble’, ‘Swift’ and
‘Chatterbox’, names we can read in the early script, Linear B.
Celebrants of festivals connected with fertility and viticulture had
for centuries hurled abuse at local individuals while they processed
in mummers’ costumes through the villages. The stem kom‐ in
komoidia, ‘comedy’, means ‘revel’ or ‘carousal’, while also
sounding like the Greek word for an unwalled rural village:
komoidia thus means a ‘revel‐ode’, with rustic overtones.
But ad hominem satire incorporated into a musical drama, along
What is in the basket on his head? Frogs? Figs?
The Actor on the right plays a King or Tyrant (eagletopped sceptre)
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Posted by Edith Hall at 05:38
with a wildly imaginative plotline,
was something completely new. A
brilliant idea which has had a long
future. Any tips on shows offering
Aristophanic laughter as hardcore
as Book of Mormon will be very
gratefully received.
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