Thoughts on Aristophanes' Clouds

My latest book is Aristophanes’ Clouds, an ancient Greek comedy performed originally in 423 B.C. and thereafter in revised form. I read this edition, which I felt was an excellent choice. There is a really long introduction to Aristophanes generally and then introductions to each play as well, all written by the translator. I can’t lie, these introductions can be pretty longwinded, but they are also full of useful information about the cultural context for this and other Aristophanes plays. Clouds comes from a genre known as “old comedy,” characterized by apparently its crassness, sexual innuendo, and political commentary. I like the translator’s general philosophy, which he explains, of keeping the original cultural references, attempting to match puns as well as he can, and basically trying to keep the original flavor of the plays intact while rendering them as comprehensible and enjoyable to moderners as he can without actually modernizing them.

A lot of the humor in this is surprisingly ridiculous and juvenile. Some of it’s almost like stand up comedy in its lampooning of the audience, as well as various prominent political figures in basically name calling fashion—calling them women, calling them cowards, etc. Expect lots of bathroom humor. I have a pretty lowbrow sense of humor, so I was fine with all this and probably found this play more accessible and entertaining than Aeschylus plays which I previously read but haven’t blogged about yet because it was prior to the genesis of the blog project. The part of the play mocking the sophists where characters named moral and immoral argue about who is better is particularly entertaining (moral gives up and agrees that immoral is better in the end). Socrates is a character here, which was pretty entertaining as well, especially if you’re in the midst of reading through Plato as I am.

With all that said, it’s sort of bizarre that this culture which created these intellectual giants also staged comedies as a form of worship at a divine festival—and that the comedies are basically full of fart jokes and apparently had lots of actors costumed to have grotesquely large dicks flopping around. I assume the audience of these works included all of the prominent members of Athenian society, aristocrats, etc. I cannot really imagine, say, William Barr and Chuck Schumer taking in the film “Sausage Party” together, or even admitting to anyone they had seen it at all, which seems to be a modern American analogue. That’s really a poor comparison because nobody thinks “Sausage Party” is part of a divine ritual, and Christianity has nothing analogous that I know of to a festival of Dionysus. I suspect that people at these comedies and tragedies were completely blitzed from drinking wine all day, and this comedy would be hilarious to a drunk person. Even without immediately understanding most of the cultural and political references (as the intro explains, a joke you have to explain isn’t very funny), the humor does come through 2400 years later.

Another interesting thing I’ve noticed is that even though this was a festival to Dionysus, Clouds comes right out and claims that Zeus and the rest of the gods aren’t real and that instead we ought to be worshipping the clouds. To some extent, this view is being lampooned, but, on the other hand, this is the kind of thing that I’m not sure that Christianity has ever or would ever joke about, and a play like this about Islam probably gets you killed in an Islamic country even today. I’m not sure which is the right way to organize a society, it’s just interesting to see that ancient Greek philosophers and writers apparently had wide latitude in sort of mocking the gods or being less than serious about their existence and religion more generally. Monotheistic religions don’t seem inclined to put up with this type of conjecture or joking.

Finally, I enjoyed the fourth wall breaking aspects of Clouds. For example, the chorus insults the audience and judges for not selecting Clouds as the winner in previous festivals.

At any rate, I liked the play and liked this edition. I may come back and read some of the others at some point, even though they aren’t on the master list.