Saturday, September 23, 2023
Not a Bit Funny?
Charles T. Murphy, "Popular Comedy in Aristophanes,"
American Journal of Philology 93.1 (January, 1972) 169-189 (at 171):
To me, it's one of the funniest passages (pun intended, Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. passage, senses I.1.8 and IV.13) that I've ever read. I wish I could see it performed on stage. It ranks up there with Gargantua's search for the perfect arse-wipe and the episode in which Sancho Panza defecates in the dark right under Don Quixote's nose.
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More prolonged and less palatable to modern taste is the easing-scene in Ecc., 311-71. Here Blepyrus, husband of Praxagora, the leader of the Greek Women's Liberation Movement, comes out of the house in his wife's clothes: she has sneaked out with his clothes to attend the Ecclesia, dressed as a man. He has had a violent attack of diarrhea, and proceeds to defecate on stage, and discusses his predicament with a friend for all of 60 lines. The scene, to be sure, introduces one of the leading characters and shows the straits to which he has been reduced by his wife. But it is intolerably long and vulgar, and not (to most modern tastes) a bit funny.In this scene from Aristophanes' Women at the Assembly (Ecclesiazusae), Blepyrus suffers from constipation, not diarrhea.
To me, it's one of the funniest passages (pun intended, Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. passage, senses I.1.8 and IV.13) that I've ever read. I wish I could see it performed on stage. It ranks up there with Gargantua's search for the perfect arse-wipe and the episode in which Sancho Panza defecates in the dark right under Don Quixote's nose.
Labels: noctes scatologicae, typographical and other errors
