The Comedian as Critic: Greek Old Comedy and Poetics by Matthew Wright (review)

This book argues that old comedy engaged in literary criticism. This fairly reasonable assertion (Frogs, after all, tends to be standard reading for ancient literary theory courses) is supported by two rather surprising claims: that comedians generally aimed for an “elite” target audience and that they wrote primarily to be read later by these elite readers, not for popular performance. Wright is confi-dently reactionary against notions of performance culture (3–4, 142) and offers instead the idea of a reading culture. Different from some recent notions of reading culture as primarily social and performative (for example, W. Johnson, AJP 121 [2000] 593–627), Wright’s notion is instead rather modern-looking: one where comedians in libraries assiduously plant allusions to be discovered later by equally assiduous readers.

Chapter 1, “Reading Comic Criticism,” spells out three positions that are important for the book as a whole: first that comedy was aimed to please an elite “target” audience rather than the masses (4–5); second that this “target” audience read comic texts (5); and, third, that comic humor makes any stated opinion suspect. This last position receives most of the chapter’s attention: instead of offering a clear didactic program, the comedians are “playing around” with ideas and “having fun by distorting or refracting ideas that were already in the air” (“playing around” and “ludic” being important motifs for the book, x, 24, 70, 139, etc.).

Chapter 2 develops Wright’s argument for “elitist” comedy by tackling what surely must be the first question in any reader’s mind: “But weren’t the comedians trying to win a popular competition?” Wright’s answer is: no, they were not. Here he brings in some interesting sociological studies on prizes in culture (37–40), giving substance to the idea that writers might disdain prizes and not be writing to win them at all. Inasmuch as this view is the polar opposite of, for example, Z. Biles’ 2012 Aristophanes and the Poetics of Competition, we can look forward to future debates.

Chapter 3 addresses the issue of “novelty” (kainotēs)—the most frequent criterion in comic criticism—and puts Wright’s ironic reading of comedy on display. The comedians do not really mean that their work is “new” and their rivals’ is hackneyed, but are instead “playing around” with the concept of novelty (70). Similarly, in chapter 4, “The Metaphorical Language of Criticism,” which provides a rich investigation of the metaphors comedy uses for critical evaluation (ψυχρός, λεπτός, food, etc.), Wright argues that the comedians are not casting these metaphors as straightforward judgments on poetry, but are again playing with the ideas underlying these metaphors: “It may be that the comedians are trying to make us reflect critically before using hackneyed metaphors or clichés; it may be that they are to be seen as polemically rejecting this sort of language, exposing its inherent ambiguity” (139).

Chapter 5 develops Wright’s replacement of “performance culture” (141–42) with “reading culture.” Comedians had access to a library of texts when writing (146) and the pay-off for this historical reconstruction (the evidence of which is based on the allusiveness of the comic texts) is that the ancient comedian writes texts that are intended to be read alongside other texts until all the allusions are tracked down. The pleasure of these allusions often lies exclusively in spotting the allusions themselves (148).

The book is clearly written and enjoyable to read. Wright’s use of the comic fragments is deft and lively and fills the book with many colorful examples. He is aware that the “elitist” position will raise some hackles (46), but his claim that there is no evidence (56) that comedians wished to win popular competitions—almost a starting point for his general view—is puzzling. Plato (whom he cites at 44) explicitly says that comedians (and tragedians) pandered to the mob in order to win competitions. How could the elitist...