Around the year 400 BC, Aristophanes wrote the comedic play Lysistrata to convince Athenians to stop the Peloponnesian War against Sparta. The main protagonist, Lysistrata, is a brilliant Athenian woman who rallies a sex strike within Athens and Sparta in order to force a peace treaty between the two city-states. In addition to incorporating sexuality as a comedic element in his play, which the Greeks embraced as a natural side of humanity, Aristophanes also utilizes the elements: dramatic irony, absentmindedness, the dancing jack, and the snow ball. These elements, Henry Bergson argues in his book Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, are what stimulates laughter. This essay will focus on analyzing the third scene of Lysistrata with
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These two interpretations are caused by the audience knowing information which is unknown to the characters in a story. Therefore, the audience will react differently to certain incidences compared to what the characters actually do. In the play Lysistrata, the audience knows that the women of Athens are on a sex strike, but the men in the play do not. In scene three, Cinesias desperately begs her wife, Myrrhine, to sleep with him while she does everything to tease him without fulfilling his request. This situation amuses the audience because they know Myrrhine’s motive while watching her fool the clueless Cinesias. Furthermore, Zinsser and Highet both explain why dramatic irony amuses the audience. According to Zinsser, a humorist allows readers to feel superior than the writer (Zinsser 227). Similarly, Highet argues, “Comedy and farce look askance and from below” (Highet 155). Dramatic irony in Lysistrata creates the relationship of the humorist and the humored by demeaning the characters to elevate the
These two interpretations are caused by the audience knowing information which is unknown to the characters in a story. Therefore, the audience will react differently to certain incidences compared to what the characters actually do. In the play Lysistrata, the audience knows that the women of Athens are on a sex strike, but the men in the play do not. In scene three, Cinesias desperately begs her wife, Myrrhine, to sleep with him while she does everything to tease him without fulfilling his request. This situation amuses the audience because they know Myrrhine’s motive while watching her fool the clueless Cinesias. Furthermore, Zinsser and Highet both explain why dramatic irony amuses the audience. According to Zinsser, a humorist allows readers to feel superior than the writer (Zinsser 227). Similarly, Highet argues, “Comedy and farce look askance and from below” (Highet 155). Dramatic irony in Lysistrata creates the relationship of the humorist and the humored by demeaning the characters to elevate the