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Aristotle’s Aesthetiquette
The Rudeness in Aristophanic Comedy
Buffoonish, churlish, and braggadocian, Philokleon mocks all the virtues
of social intercourse. Like most (male) Aristophanic heroes, he
curses and belches his way out of society and feels no shame about it.
So Aristotle would seem to have described Attic comedy. But he
has not gone far enough, for comedy’s characters are not only rude but
winningly rude.
The rudeness in Aristophanic comedy does not lie just outside the
play’s world as it does in the New Comedy of Menander and his
successors (the first examples of which were produced after Aristotle’s
death), where it is a source of humor that the characters cross into but
return from in time for the comedy’s resolution. Rudeness is indeed a
source of humor in Old Comedy: part of its pleasure, as the Tractatus
recognizes, derives from our ability to ridicule the characters (TC 6, 8).
But this function of comic rudeness requires that a play reaffirm the
virtues it has been violating, and Old Comedy refuses that move. Laughter
at an Old Comedy is rude.
The question is simple. If comedy takes as its subject that which
is laughable, and if what is laughable turns out to be what violates
etiquette, then comedy’s subject is and only ought to be rudeness. And
how can judgments grounded in etiquette tolerate systemic rudeness?
Urbane comedies give a satisfying answer: the audience laughs
from an elevated position (the laughter is exclusively laughter of ridicule)
and thereby puts the rudeness in its place. Comic catharsis calibrates
ridicule as tragic catharsis calibrates pity and fear. The norms of
social intercourse are saved.
But Aristophanic comedy is not urbane. Rudeness emblematizes
happiness, while politeness comes off as hypocritical and effeminate.
The hero’s progress out of stultifying convention into rude truth gets
depicted as a transition from superannuation, disease, and death, into
rejuvenation; often enough as well, when cultic imagery threads through
the plots, from Dionysian fragmentation to the resurrection of the
vegetation god.
Discourtesy is not a threat for comedy to overcome but a goal for
it to reach.
But in that case laughing at Old Comedy doesn’t mean looking
down on its characters, for when they succeed it also includes delighting
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