We have all suffered in the company of a bore who cracks jokes so obscure that they demand a laborious explanation, for, in order to raise a laugh, humour must have an immediate impact, and obscurity is seldom a hallmark of the good joke. A captive audience can be terrifyingly unresponsive, and anyone who has read an Aristophanic comedy with students soon learns for himself that a scholarly exposition may destroy any joke, irrespective of its qualities. Yesterday's joke is stale and last year's joke dead; to resurrect a joke more than two thousand years old is no easy task. In an attempt to make the ancient writer of comedy more vital, we may have recourse to a contemporary analogy: twenty years ago we might have compared the technique of Aristophanes' comedies with that of the comedy series currently successful on radio; today the medium as well as the show has changed, and we refer to the art of television humour, and this indeed is a better parallel, since television comedy depends upon visual as much as upon verbal effects. Both radio and television number their audience in hundreds of thousands, and, what is more important, their audience represents as fair a cross-section of the total population as did the audience attending the theatre in fifth-century Athens. The fact that Athenian drama was staged at festivals organized by the state proves that it was entertainment designed to please everybody and not just a select few, that is, it was designed for a ‘popular’ and not an élite audience. The colossal size of the Greek theatre (the Theatre of Dionysus at Athens accommodated some 14,000 spectators) offers further confirmation. But the modern theatre is no longer a source of mass entertainment, and even the long-running farce, however many parties up in town for the day may patronize it, hardly suggests the type of audience and atmosphere which Aristophanes and his compatriots would have known and been anxious to exploit. Some idea of this atmosphere may be gained if one thinks in terms of a frequently quoted modern parallel, the emotionally charged football match. The intimacy of the smart revue, an analogy favoured by some, makes it a poor basis for comparison. If it is the English stage and our own experience of the theatre which must provide us with our illustration, the most evocative comparison, I suggest, is one between the audience packed into the Theatre of Dionysus and the audience which jostles its way into the seats at the Christmas pantomime, for this is an audience mainly composed of children as unsophisticated and uninhibited (and as determined to squeeze every ounce of pleasure from what for them also is an annual treat) as those who witnessed the original performance of Old Comedy. The audience at the pantomime, joining in the choruses of the songs and booing the villain, can be unrestrained one moment, but sit spellbound a minute later as the spectators gape at the spectacular ‘set’ which precedes the intermission and announces the finale. The frequent address to the audience made by Aristophanes' characters argues for the same degree of audience participation, while the entry of the chorus—my personal favourite is the parodos of the Birds—would be greeted by an attentiveness in keeping with its solemnity and splendour.
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