The Humor of Metatheater in Greek and Roman Comedy

Abstract: Moments of scripted or on-stage laughter in the plays of Aristophanes, Plautus, and Terence help us understand how the humor of overt metatheater worked in ancient comedy and what role metatheatrical humor played in a comic production. Modern humor theory, which has its roots in Greek and Roman philosophical and rhetorical texts, provides a framework for analysis of moments of scripted and onstage laughter through the lens of incongruity, superiority, and release theories. The overt acknowledgement of the spectators in Greek and Roman comedy is shown to produce humor from delight at the incongruity of the disruption of the stage world or from feelings of superiority to one's fellow spectators, but in longer speeches poets rarely rely on the humor arising from overt metatheater alone.