Aristophanes and Alazoneia : Laughing at the Parabasis of the Clouds

The stern admonitions of the Eupolidean section of the Clouds (518–562) have long provoked comments and analysis from scholars captivated by its rare glimpse of an author offering self-reflexive commentary on his own art.¹ Other scholars have focused their analysis on thorny issues of composition and dating.² Such debate pursues two basic types of questions, historical (Why did the first version of the play fail? When did Aristophanes revise it?)³ and biographical (How did Aristophanes feel about the reception of the first version? To what extent did he revise it?).⁴ In his 1991 monograph on the parabasis, T. K. Hubbard attempts to straddle these awkward tensions in modern scholarship. First he characterizes the parabasis in Old Comedy as a complex poetic vehicle for the projection of Aristophanes' public persona and thus initially treats the tone of the parabasis of the Clouds guardedly: "As we know from the parabases of [the Clouds] and of the Wasps, Aristophanes was, or at least pretends to have been, deeply disturbed by the third-place showing of the original play."⁵ In the very next sentence, however, Hubbard retreats to historical biography quite unreservedly: "This was his first last-place finish, and was particularly discouraging for a play which he regarded as one of his most sophisticated and ambitious. His attempt to revise and rehabilitate the play a few years later is therefore not surprising."⁶ In the wake of such readings, Keith Sidwell has demonstrated how the most basic assumptions about this passage are tenuous and open to fundamentally different interpretations.⁷

Some scholars have, however, expressed in passing the belief that the parabasis is more humorous than revealingly expository.⁸ The claim that Aristophanes is making a joke is, curiously, a difficult one to support in scholarly terms. Scholarship over the last several decades has substantially transformed modern understanding of and appreciation for Aristophanes as an intellectual force to be respected and Greek comedy as a cultural force to be reckoned with. Yet, for all the advances in knowledge great and small, technical and theoretical, informational and interpretive, scholars of Aristophanes continue to struggle with or avoid problems central to assessing the experience that was and is Aristophanic comedy. Prominent among these conundrums is the issue of being funny.⁹

A combination of scholarly tools ancient and modern, however, validates the hunch expressed by some scholars that Aristophanes filled Clouds 518–562 with jokes designed to provoke laughter. In antiquity, Plato and other sources described a social mechanism (usually called alazoneia) in reaction to which ancient Greeks laughed. When the parabasis of the Clouds, or any number of other passages in Old Comedy for that matter, is analyzed in the context of performance dynamics, the mechanism of alazoneia demonstrates that Aristophanes' braggadocio would have inspired laughter from his audience.

Plato, not without a sense of humor even in his most crabbed works, provides our most detailed account from antiquity of alazoneia on stage and its relationship to laughter. Always concerned with the care of the soul and likewise vexed at impurity of all sorts, Plato devotes much of his late dialogue the Philebus to analyzing the complex mixtures of pleasure and pain that constitute much of human experience.¹⁰ To demonstrate that the soul experiences mixtures of pain and pleasure, Plato has Socrates turn quickly to the experience of drama (48a). "Do you remember how people enjoy crying () at tragedies?" asks Socrates. Protarchus, Plato's polite respondent for the occasion, says "of course" (). Socrates continues: to the disposition of the soul at a comedy () there is a mixture of pleasure and pain (). Ever the dutifully half-witted interlocutor, Protarchus prefigures the uncertainty, anxiety, and denial of scholars of comedy over the centuries when he answers, "I don't quite get it" (). Socrates reassures his companion that understanding such an experience is far from easy () and recommends pursuing this example specifically because of its dark obscurity (, 48b).

At this juncture Plato lays out the basic emotional dynamic of comedy (48c–49c). The crux lies in defining...