Aristophanes
Aristophanes was an Athenian comic playwright (5th-4th century BC). His works are often characterized as Satire, which is quite remarkable--the Greeks never really went in for satire that much, to the point where they didn't even have a word for it (the genre was considered to be an innovation of the Romans, who were rather fonder of the style).
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Brekekekéx-koáx-koáx
—The familiar chant from The Frogs
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His notable plays include The Clouds (Νεφέλαι, Nephelai), which famously lampooned Socrates; The Wasps (Σφῆκες, Sphékes), a satire of contemporary litigious society; The Birds (Ὄρνιθες, Ornithes), which features the original Cloudcuckooland; Lysistrata (Λυσιστράτη), in which the women of Greece bring about the end of a war by going on a sex strike; and The Frogs (Βάτραχοι, Batrachoi), in which Euripides and Aeschylus contend in the afterlife for the title of Best Tragic Poet. (Many of his plays, in what was then a common convention, were named after the role adopted by the Greek Chorus; Lysistrata, named after the lead character, is the only exception out of those listed here.)
The Frogs was loosely adapted into a musical by Stephen Sondheim et al., with William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw as the contentious dramatists, and a much-expanded role for the frogs.
- Acceptable Breaks From Reality: The use of a flute for nightingale song, due to the actor's lack of an oscine syrinx.
- Bald of Awesome: His own!
- Black Comedy Rape
- Bring My Brown Pants
- Dirty Old Woman
- Dumb Muscle: Heracles fits this stereotype when he appears, for example as a member of the embassy to Cloudcuckooland in The Birds.
- Floating Continent
- Funny Foreigner: Triballos, the "barbarian god" that is sent as an ambassador to Cloudcuckooland in The Birds.
- Gag Penis
- Gender Bender: Mnesilochus in The Poet And The Women.
- Greek Chorus
- Hilarity Ensues: Duh
- Have You Seen My God?
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall
- Missing Episode: Not all his plays survived the fall of the Roman Empire.
- Though also something of an inversion- virtually all other examples of Athenian Old Comedy are lost to us, the surviving Aristophanic plays being the only ones remaining.
- No Fourth Wall
- Nostalgia Ain't Like It Used to Be: Aristophanes wasn't fond of modernity and clearly thought that Greece used to be a much sweeter place a few decades before his plays. Since most of his works were written during the Peloponnesian War, he wasn't completely wrong.
- Rule of Funny
- Swapped Roles: Dionysos and his mortal servant disguise themselves as each other in The Frogs.
- Take That: Euripides is one of the most frequent targets.
- Talk to the Fist, thou fraudulent soothsayer! (from The Birds)
- War Is Hell