Laudator Temporis Acti

K.J. Dover, "Greek Comedy," in Fifty Years (and Twelve) of Classical Scholarship (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), pp. 123-158 (at 127-128, with notes on 152):

To understand pre-Christian religious attitudes requires a great imaginative effort, and those who make it are commonly regarded as impostors by those who cannot. The intimate association of the gods with the fabric of ordinary Greek life is something which might be better understood by a Papuan than by a bishop, and perhaps best of all by the medieval Christian, whose humour was full of casual blasphemy²¹ and prompt to interweave the comic and the tremendous.²² The fact is that the Greek gods had human pleasures and understood laughter; at the right time and place they could take a joke.<sup>23

21</sup> P. Lehmann, Die Parodie im Mittelalter, München, 1922, pp. 39-40, 55-6, 208.

²² E.g. the persistent intrusion of comic elements in the Alsfeld Passion Play (ed. R. Froning, Das Drama des Mittelalters vols. 2-3, Stuttgart, n.d.: cf. P. Scherer, Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur, Berlin, 1883, pp. 247-8) or the comic treatment of Noah and his family in The Chester Pageant of the Deluge (ed. E. Rhys in Everyman and Other Interludes, London 1909); cf. G. Murray, Aristophanes, Oxford, 1933, p. 2.

²³ Wilamowitz, Der Glaube der Hellenen, Berlin, 1931, vol. 1, p. 43 and vol. 2, pp. 96-8; H. Kleinknecht, Die Gebetsparodie in der Antike, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1937, pp. 116-22.

Related post: Religion and Laughter.