Five Forms of Ancient Philosophical Comedy

As we began our book with the Four Ancient Philosophical Orientations, we now conclude with Five Forms of Ancient Philosophical Comedy. We add a fifth form because we speak of comedy, and we cannot speak of ancient comedy without including Diogenes the Cynic. Echoing the end of ‘Albumen C’, this marks a different kind of crack-up, the cracking up of laughter. Comedy reveals a unique dimension of Stoicism.

Recall the four philosophical orientations from the ‘Introduction’: pre-Socratic depth, Platonic height, Aristotelian inwardness and Stoic surface. Each of these aligns with a form of comedy: pre- Socratics slapstick, Socratic irony, Aristotelian wit and Stoic humour. Compared to the first three ancient comedic forms, Stoicism is perverse. To see how Stoic comedy turns the depths and heights inside out through a double-sided paradoxical surface humor, let us work through each one by one. This table helps keep us focused:

Pre-Socratic Slapstick

Slapstick, a kind of lowbrow humour, is characterised by excessively physical and exaggerated routines, such as cartoonish violence and surprise props. The term ‘slapstick’ (in Italian: batacchio) refers to a prop popularised in the sixteenth-century Italian commedia dell’arte. It is a percussion instrument made of two small slats of wood, bound at one end, which creates a loud crack sound when slapped together. Actors hit each other with the slapstick in order to create the loud sound effect associated with pain but without actually hurting. Chase scenes and beatings – as in Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors, Buster Keaton gags or Marx Brothers routines – exemplify slapstick. The pre-Socratics can be said to use an early form of slapstick because their metaphysical explanations caricature matter through excessively ‘physical language’ and corporeal concepts (LS 134). They are ‘physical’ in so far as they are denotative, that is, in so far as they brusquely point to brute matter. ‘Every denotation’, Deleuze writes, ‘is prolonged in consumption, pulverization, and destruction’ (LS 135). Consider the examples of Democritus, Thales and Empedocles.