Tip-Off #201 - True comedy
Truth is a laughing matter.
In times of chaos and danger, discussing comedy feels out of place—except when describing public figures, and even then, it’s rarely funny. Laughter in such moments looks like mockery or denial. To suggest that truth itself is a form of comedy may sound absurd. Yet truth and comedy belong together in more ways than one.
Aristophanes, often called the Father of Comedy, wrote plays in ancient Athens that satirized real people and events. His Old Comedy style mixed farcical fantasy with blunt critique. The stage became a public forum: choruses spoke directly to the crowd, and ridiculous costumes and witty songs mocked leaders and gods alike.
Aristophanes was and still is often misunderstood. His outrageous scenes and crude jokes made some dismiss his plays as buffoonery. But critics in his time sensed their deeper impact. Plato later singled out The Clouds as a slanderous caricature that helped turn public opinion against Socrates. In that play, Socrates was lampooned as a charlatan in a “Thinkery,” which Plato believed poisoned Athens’s view of the real philosopher.
The Father of Comedy had held up a mirror so sharp that some believed it had drawn blood. A joke can, without confrontation, undermine a lie by showing how absurd it is. Satire has long exposed hypocrisy and challenged falsehoods. The court jester could speak dangerous truths others could not—wrapped in laughter.
Today, a jester-turned-president has used humor as a weapon in war. Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, rose from comedy and acting to rally his people under fire. His deadpan wit and ironic asides reframed the conflict. Ukraine’s crisis was deadly serious, but its spirit remained intact.
Satirical news and comedy shows present leaders in comic contradiction. What’s dismissed as a joke often reveals more than official language permits. Stephen Colbert once mocked and praised a sitting president in the same breath, exposing media-political coziness. Jon Stewart and others turn parody into public insight, saying what plain speech avoids.
Comedy is not just a laughing matter. The Father of Comedy knew that—as did the “Father of Western Philosophy,” who accused him of impugning Socrates. Aristophanes once wrote, “Comedy sometimes discerns what is right,” whether or not it’s funny and whatever else is true. Plato’s Socrates, for his part, asked questions that tied experts in knots, then claimed to know nothing himself: “I do not think I know what I do not know.”
Dante’s Divine Comedy begins in hell and climbs through suffering to a final vision of not laughter but solemn joy—more enduring than what came before. Comedy is no more a denial of the tragedy it follows than Easter is a denial of Good Friday.
Comedy, in its truest sense, carries the weight of what it survives. Shakespeare knew this. In King Lear, the Fool says what no one else dares—riddles that speak madness before it arrives. He vanishes before the worst, but his absence deepens the silence. The Fool doesn’t undo the tragedy. He prepares us for it.
In our time, The Simpsons—a cartoon at first glance—has long exposed American contradictions: family values and dysfunction, political slogans and civic apathy, religion and commerce, often in the same frame. When Homer kneels to pray, then buys beer with the tithe, it isn’t parody—it’s a mirror, held steady by comedy, reflecting the strange coherence of everyday life.
At the end of his life, after the world has done its worst, Lear turns to his daughter and says:
“...Come, let’s away to prison;
We two alone... so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh...” (5.3.8–12)
In that moment, laughter doesn’t undo the tragedy, it arrives anyway—unexpected, uninvited, and undefeated. Something survives that was never promised. The play is not over. Comedy holds its applause.
Notes and reading
“Comedy too can sometimes discern what is right.”
― A gloss on Aristophanes’ belief in the moral and political power of comedy, expressed in two of his plays, The Acharnians and The Knights.
Aristophanes: The Complete Plays - The New Translations by Paul Roche (2005).
Plato on comedy and Aristophanes: Symposium, The Apology.
“Plato treats Aristophanes as both a comic visionary and a cultural hazard—his laughter revealing hidden truths, but also misdirecting the soul from philosophy.”
—Stephen Halliwell, Greek Laughter: A Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity, Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 278.- Halliwell is a British classicist, emeritus professor at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.
Aristophanic Humour: Theory and Practice - Edited by Edith Hall and Peter Swallow (2021). Hall is a Fellow of the British Academy and formerly served as Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at the University of Oxford. Swallow is a British classicist, academic, and politician who has served as a Member of Parliament since 2024.
Tip-Off #200 - The drift toward illiberalism
Tip-Off #199 - Astonishing