There has never been a better moment to think about how parody influences a democratic public's view of politics. In the last decade alone, comics and comedians have been elected to high office in Brazil (Francisco Everado Oliveira Silva, 2010), Iceland (John Gnarr, 2010), Guatemala (Jimmy Morales, 2015) and Ukraine (Volodymyr Zelensky, 2018), and become high ranking members of influential parties in Italy (Beppe Grillo) and Lithuania (Arūnas Valinskas). In 2017 the fictitious politician ‘Ljubiša Preletačević Beli’ (a parodic impersonation of a corrupt official, created by Serbian comic Luka Maksimović) won 10% of votes for president. Meanwhile, consumer-citizens increasingly prefer parodic media over traditional media as reliable sources of serious news.
S.'s monograph enriches our understanding of how parody functions in the public sphere. The book investigates how authors of Athenian Old Comedy (especially Aristophanes) adapted visual and poetic features of contemporary genres (tragedy, satyr play, lyric) to distinguish themselves and their craft from rival dramatists and to solidify comedy's reputation as a literary form capable of addressing social and political issues. Taking his cue from M. Revermann, S. applies a capitalist model to the dynamics of the Athenian comic theatre, in which parody (both intrageneric and intergeneric) operates as a ‘competitive poetic strategy’, permitting comedians to shape their popular reputations in ways ‘akin to the modern marketing strategy of product branding’ (p. 16). S. deploys this heuristic not only metaphorically but literally to illuminate Aristophanes’ development of a ‘brand’ of comedy in a ‘marketplace’ (pp. 117, 148, 184, 210, 212) populated by ‘consumers’ (pp. 18, 46, 54, 184, 210).
The argument opens with a study (Chapter 1) of branding through paratragedy in Aristophanes’ earliest extant work, Acharnians (425 bce). S. argues that the play's parody of Euripides’ lost Telephus (438 bce), with its emphasis on the title character's cultural and aesthetic ‘hybridity’ (pp. 25, 37, 41), is central to Aristophanes’ self-presentation (his early ‘branding strategy’, p. 24). The socio-cultural and aesthetic tensions inherent in Euripides’ Telephus (who is both Greek and non-Greek, king and beggar, epic hero and tragic victim) make him an ideal figure to instantiate the hybrid form of political comedy for which Aristophanes coins the term trugôidia (Ach. 498–9). With the ‘launch’ (p. 47) of trugôidia™ in Acharnians, Aristophanes attempts to set his ‘brand’ apart from his rivals and to claim a share of tragedy's political and artistic authority.
Chapter 2 turns to the corpus of vase paintings datable to Aristophanes’ career and containing evidence of comedy's interaction with rival dramatic genres. Building on studies of para-iconography by O. Taplin and E. Csapo, S. divides the evidence into three interpretative frames: the study of scene-specific illustrations (e.g. the ‘Würzburg Telephus’ and ‘Berlin Heracles’) that reflect intergeneric parodies through visual cues of props and costumes; scenes of mythological burlesque overturning key moments of heroic myth, suspending the action and making comic alterations and substitutions (e.g. Cassandra dragging a comic Ajax by his hairpiece away from a Palladion); and images that appear to draw visual content from two or more dramatic genres (e.g. a tragic Aegisthus wandering confusedly into an unknown comedy on the ‘Choregoi’ vase). These images are valuable iconographic evidence for the visual dimension of comic parodies, whose paratragedy and parasatyrism result from layering or juxtaposing verbal and visual cues.
S.'s Chapter 3 on satyr play does not offer a strictly intergeneric study of two independent dramatic genres, but rather argues that parasatyrism operated as a ‘mode of comedy’ (p. 90; emphasis in original) that permitted comedians to defamiliarise their plays’ political contents. Cratinus’ fragmentary Dionysalexandros illustrates comic parasatyrism by parodying the ‘Judgment of Paris’, using a disguised Dionysus and a chorus of satyrs to assimilate the myth to the ‘adultery narrative’ known to have been a popular subject in song and literature (p. 98). Cratinus’ ‘experiment’ (p. 102) with comic satyrs offers a key to reading the hauling-scene of Aristophanes’ Peace (421 bce), whose chorus of Panhellenes is assimilated to satyrs through speech and action. (S., in collaboration with E. Lytle, has published an essay [CP 115 (2020), 365–401] that uses evidence from vases alongside fragments of satyr drama [Aeschylus’ Netfishers] to provide additional cultural background helpful for understanding this scene in Peace.)
Returning in Chapter 4 to Aristophanes’ efforts to position his ‘brand’, S. expands his reading of the hauling-scene in Peace into a paratragic reading of the play. Analysis focuses on the metapoetic dung beetle, which functions both as a parody of Euripides’ lost Bellerophon and as a metaphor for trugôidia™ (parasitic, shit-eating, striving for higher status). The comic insect's success transporting Trygaeus to Olympus encapsulates the play's paraliterary agenda of converting the failures of rival genres into successes. This agenda motivates the play's second half, which reverses the tragic topos of the inverted ritual by rehabilitating civic institutions, sacrifice (pp. 135–9) and wedding (pp. 139–43), that reinforce social cohesion.
Comedy's role in protecting cultural institutions sparks a discussion of comic paralyricism (Chapter 5), through which comedians positioned themselves as defenders of tradition, resisting the socially corrosive effects of the ‘New Music’. The violently divergent musical tastes of Strepsiades and Pheidippides in Clouds and the impoverished pseudo-Pindarist of Birds implicate New Musicians in Athens’ social and moral decline. Comic parodies of tragic choral lyrics (like the Hymn to Apollo at Thes. 101–29) and of actor arias (like the parody of Euripides’ Andromeda at Thes. 1015–55 and the lament for a rooster at Frogs 1331–63) exaggerate the New Music's style, rhythm and content, allowing comedians to ‘project themselves as defenders of an imagined canon of classical song’ (pp. 178).
The study culminates in an extended analysis (Chapter 6) of paratragedy in Thesmophoriazousae, which contrasts the (Euripidean) tragedy's reputation for corrupting Athenian domestic relations by making men suspicious of their wives, with (Aristophanic) comedy's ability to depict true female depravity. In-law's parodic description of women's secret sexual lives (Thes. 476–519) shows how comic wives conceal infidelities using principles of household management, a vehicle for female mischief beyond the capacity of tragic drama to represent. The play's critique of Euripidean realism functions as an ‘advertisement for comedy's near unlimited capacity for representation’ (p. 204).
S.'s book contributes to several dialogues in classical literary studies by offering valuable insights. It furthers our understanding of competition among comedians (e.g. D. Harvey and J. Wilkins, I. Storey, Revermann and E. Bakola); the focus on paraliterary discourses reflects a trend to rethink the categories of dramatic genre (e.g. H. Foley, L. Swift and M. Farmer, and in the recent issue of CP); and S.'s use of vase painting to support his concept of parody contributes to the reconstruction of ancient performance through iconography (e.g. Taplin and Csapo) by exploring how images can evoke not only specific mythological scenes, but literary genres. The primary heuristic drawn from the world of commercial branding also invites fuller transdisciplinary reflection. Marketing theorists have observed that products spanning market categories may have lower consumer appeal: one study of US feature films found that audience appeal and box-office revenue decreased as multi-generic breadth increased (G. Hsu, M. Hannan and Ö. Koçak, American Sociological Review 74 [2009], 150–69); another study of Italian wines demonstrated that category-spanning lowered a wine's critical reception and rating (G. Negro, M. Hannan and H. Rao, Industrial and Corporate Change 19 [2010], 1397–425). S. acknowledges the historically poor reception of Peace (p. 120) and Thesmophoriazousae (p. 181), and it is hard to avoid wondering whether, after Acharnians’ initial success, Aristophanes’ hybrid trugôidia™ was a failed comic enterprise. A multi-authored diachronic study of literary ‘branding’ involving specialists in marketing would be interesting to read. Nevertheless, the book advances our understanding of comic authorial self-presentation and suggests that transgeneric studies are nearing the end of a ‘long runway’.
