I have two translations of a couple plays by Aristophanes, and thought they were interesting. I also read recently on Wikipedia that they’re Old Comedy plays from Ancient Greek, but I also read that The Clouds was originally a bit darker or serious and that it flopped upon its premiere. What do you guys think?
Do you think The Clouds is funny despite that? And what is your favorite Aristophanes comedy for its Greeky humor? 🙂
by DonQuixote1999
2 Comments
I once read an article online about Aristophanes about how he was one of the most renowned comedy playwrights in history. I downloaded a pdf of one of his works, and it felt like reading inside jokes from a subreddit I never visit. Honestly I don’t even remember the name of the play but all I can say is I couldn’t go farther.
The funniest thing about Aristophanes plays are how petty they are; it’s fucking hilarious to read the annotated translation and see how there are multiple people who are named in the plays that we know nothing about except they annoyed Aristophanes in some minor way, and those peoples names are in our canonical literature thousands of years later.
It’s like if you started a twitter account to complain about someone from work, and in the year 4000, people were studying your tweets as an example of foundational literature.