It’s hard for me to say how brilliant I think Aristophanes is. His play is so funny! There are lots of things about it that make it funny. First I would say is the exaggerations of certain characters. I really like, of course, the country bumpkin father whose trying to get out of all of his debts— Strepsiades. His complaining about his son and his attempts to master Socratic method are just so funny. Here are some lines that I really like— this is when he’s talking about how excited he is to learn these arguments: “Ah, that must be why, as I heard their voice, / my soul took wing, and now I’m really keen / to babble on of trivialities, / to argue smoke and mirrors, to deflate opinions with a small opinion of my own, / to answer someone’s reasoned argument / with my own counter-argument” (lines 396-401). I also like it when Socrates, a few lines later, talks about how the clouds are the patron gods of so many different quacks and nut cases (lines 418-427). It was also really funny to hear Strepsiades try to use the nit picking arguments about language with the whole fowl and fowlette arguments.
I really think that if Aristophanes were alive today he would work for South Park. I say that because so much of the humor seems so similar. I know that we will study South Park later on in the class, but I can’t help but notice some of the similarities right now. There’s lots of sexual humor although there’s much more in Aristophanes than South Park. There are fart chokes and poop jokes and masturbation jokes. Also, there are a lot of current events type jokes. This is what makes Aristophanes difficult to understand for us. Just like South Park in 2000 or more years will need lots and lots of footnotes, so a lot of the particular jokes of the time are difficult for us to get because they deal with ancient Athens. But just like how those jokes are especially funny now, they must’ve been especially funny for Aristophanes original audience.
Another part of Aristophanes comedy genius are his violations of the fourth wall. This is when a character addresses the audience directly. The fourth wall is the imaginary boundary between the audience and the action of the play. When a character talks directly out to the audience, this violates that illusion of a fourth wall. This is done brilliantly in this play. It happens first when the chorus leader threatens the judges who would judge the play that if they don’t give it a good judgment than the clouds will punish them. This is just really funny stuff. But the next part is the climax of the argument between Better and Worse Argument. Better argument claims that a lack of self-restraint will make one a “loose-arsed bugger.” The idea here is that if you don’t have a certain amount of self-control than you allow yourself to be used by other people, because you’ll be drug around by your pleasures and by everything that’s going on around you. This is the point that Better Argument makes. And it seems like a very good one. So when Worse Argument comes forward and says that he can refute it, the audience really wants to see how that would be done. Aristophanes turns it up a notch by having Better Argument agree to give up if Worse Argument to make his point. And then he does, brilliantly. First he claims that attorneys are all loose-arsed buggers, which Better Argument is forced to agree with. He adds to that tragic poets and politicians. But then, in what I think is the funniest point of the whole play, Worse Argument forces Better Argument to look out at the audience and to concede that it is full of loose-arsed buggers. Better Argument even identifies a few. This violation of the third wall is not only hilarious, but it implicates the audience in the joke itself.
What did you find funny?
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My favorite part from “The Clouds” was when Socrates and Strepsiades were discussing how the clouds cause the rain and not Zeus. Socrates tells Strepsiades that clouds are always present when there is rain and that if Zeus makes rain, then he should be able to make it without clouds. This discussion went on to talk about lightning and thunder. I couldn’t help but laugh when they were comparing this type of weather to stomachaches and farting. This is something I would have never thought to compare thunder to. The simplicity of the conversation to explain a phenomenon that is very complex is wonderful and makes me smile. This play was very funny and that is one part that stood out to me the most.
Just like new ideas were looked down upon at the time, the same thinking made Aristophanes’ original and creative play come in last place. I do believe if Aristophanes was alive today, he could be working on a show like South Park or The Simpsons. His portrayal of the great philosopher Socrates wasting his time and arguing with a country bum is funny to envision…especially when the country bum turns out to be masturbating the entire time. When I was reading the play, I was actually envisioning Strepsiades looking and thinking like an older Homer Simpson.
I really enjoyed Aristophanes humor in “Clouds.” I thought his potty humor was funny, whether his son was farting in his sleep or Strepsiades was reacting to the scary thunder by saying he needed to fart or shit. I especially appreciated it because often times it seemed so unexpected in the serious tone of the scene and it lightened the mood. I also thought it was brilliant to include the audience in the ‘loose-arsed’ dispute between the better argument and worse argument. I think if I were sitting in the audience and watching this play it would be hilarious to watch the better argument single out audience members and accuse them of having gigantic assholes.
I cannot help but consider how the parent-teenager dynamic may not ever change. I think this is an underlying theme in “Socrates’s Publicist”. In today’s world of media and instant communication, having a publicist is some unnecessary expense too many people accept. The celebrities I am referring to are those who only gain stardom through reality T.V. or some enormous trust fund. They contribute nothing of benefit to the larger community. I agree, that Martin does not intend to mark Socrates as useless or anything like that; rather, he pints out that his contributions are simply not concrete. He is a “thinker”, and that is something intangible. Modern pop culture focuses on people like Paris Hilton, and Justin Bieber. They may be entertaining, and girls, you may disagree regarding Bieber, but they offer nothing of authentic value to the world. Perhaps the best example would be Snookie. She gives us nothing, yet she makes money because she eats pickles and had a child out of wedlock. The obvious bridge between Socrates’s publicist, “Jackie”, and the modern entertainment industry is the subtle use of messages or messengers. Martin says Jackie has messengers constantly coming and going, to make it seem as though she has purpose and is successful. I immediately think of my little sister spending entire nights out-to-dinner with her eyes half an inch from her iphone screen and her thumbs miraculously resisting cramping as they are in perpetual texting motion. Also, Jackie has no thought for the real well-being of Socrates. She advises him to throw away his speech and accept nothing less than the death penalty. Despite her promises to help him out of his soon-to-be mortal dilemma, she tosses Socrates aside from her roll-a-dex. He is no longer of any use to her, and so he bares the consequence of trusting the greedy business of publicists in the entertainment business. I believe many individuals have had great potential for authentic contribution through music and other forms of expression, but sell out and give themselves to the entertainment industry, to be corrupted and altered into something worthless, yet entertaining, that the public is thought to “want”.
I definitely agree, seeing “The Clouds” live would be hilarious. It is awesome, yet not too surprising that flatulence humor seems to have been around since the earliest days of mankind. People will always laugh at farts. From the cave men to the jetsons-era, potty humor will always tickle people’s funny bones. Back to the play, though. Strepsiades’s whole motivation to approach the thinkery derives from Pheidippides’s financial ignorance that has caused so much debt. As I mentioned before, the existence of teenagers and their relationships with parents carries on, unchanged throughout the ages. As a child, we are allowed to be ignorant. As teenagers, we are still ignorant, yet we are more expensive. I have been the cause of financial stress for my parents, and now that I have recognized my faults, I see it in my younger sister as I have been charged with the task of becoming financially independent. I find the idea of using lessons from the thinkery as a means of escaping his debt to be somewhat clever of the part of Strepsiades. The play is funny and clever, and it is astonishing to see how the humor and relationships involved are applicable to modern life.
Something I found funny when you compared The Cloud to South Park is the idea that during this time in Athens I’m sure science was still a new concept and for the people who had no idea about it Aristophanes makes it seem absolutely ridiculous by having the students bending up to study geology with their heads and the stars with their asses. This reminds me of exactly the same approach in southpark where they take a current event people have heard about but are unsure of and make it ludicrous and offensive exactly like why I read here. Also the idea of a gnat making it’s buzzing noise from it’s ass is hilarious. I could not imagine the detail that went into this play as I would almost compare it to my experience when I had the chance to go see The Book of Norman in New York last summer which had me in tears.
I think that in “The Clouds” Arisophanes kind of pokes fun at Socrates for his overthinking and how it can be unnecessary. My favorite part is when Strepsiades asks if rhythms will help him get food. He went to the Thinkery in order to be able to hold his own in an argument. Instead Socrates is teaching him things that will not help Stepsiades with his gold but instead teach him something that will “make [him] elegant in company.” It shows how while Arisophanes appreciates the thinking done by Socrates but at the same time thinks it is ridiculous and unnecessary.