| It
is a difficult art to make the people laugh. However, it is a very old
manifestation, related to the mimic expressions of the primitive people,
to rituals of magic-religious character. Ceremonies and holy actions tested
in the Greek world, already in the VI Century b.C., in the painted decoration
of pottery and vessels, where cortèges of zoomorphic masks are pictured.
We have received about 250 names of Greek comedy writers. This testifies
the success of this kind, which many times was taken from the daily life,
while the myth always remained linked to tragedy. However, the comedy in
Athens was a composite drama, partly recited by actors in costume and partly
sung by a chorus of dancers, who moved at the sound of a flute. Of course,
to-day we can no more recreate the representations in their fullness. From
many sources we know with certainty the typical costume of the characters:
a great mask hid the whole face, while a sort of flesh-coloured tights
was worn with same paddings which, on the back, made the buttocks enormous
and, on the front, inflated the abdomen, mostly showing an enormous penis
in erection, made more evident by a short suit. From a contenutistic point
of view, the ancient Athens comedy - as we see in Aristophanes - builds
up the plot on the satire “ad personam”. In a second period, the cases
of the private life had now become odd persons - as we see in Menander
- such as the glutton, the physician, the stupid, the crippled. These characters
were a sort of anticipation of the masks of the Comedy of the Art. When
the scenic action was built-up through soliloquies, dialogues and choruses,
it was the practice that an interval was placed in the comedy consisting
of a particular song of choreuthes, namely parabasis. While the tragedy
is rigidly organized around a protagonist, often the comic characters have
no personal value, are some metaphors, representating abstract values and
the scenic action should be taken in its entirity. Let us analyze the “Clouds”,
one of the most famous comedies of Aristophanes, poet and comic writer,
who lived in Athens between 445 and 385 b.C. In less than 40 years of activity,
he wrote 40 comedies, 11 of them arrived whole till our times, besides
one thousand of fragments of the other comedies. In this comedy, the author
analyzes the intellectual persons and their influence on the society. Written
in 423 b.C., the comedy has the protagonist in Strepsiades, an old farmer
compelled by the debts contracted by his son Phidippides, great lover of
horse races, to search a safety in Socrates and his disciples. As the son
refuses to go to the school of Socrates, Strepsiades establishes to take
lessons from the sophists. As we may expect, the best of the comedy is
not so much in the plot but in the dialogues, where the very ridiculous
dissertation on the genders of substantives and the picture of a Socrates
studying the jump of a lice are described. In the Socrates think-tank,
Strepsiades is informed about the new theology, which cancels the traditional
gods like Zeus and replaces them with the Clouds, metaphors of the ambiguity
and multiform elusive reality. Pushed away for his out-of-place answers,
the oldman cannot make that trying to convince his son, this time, to present
to be accepted as a pupil of Socrates. This time Phidippides is accepted
and, to instruct him, the philosopher makes two particular characters to
appear, the embodying of the Proper Talk and of the Improper |
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