What's the difference between "Old and New comedy" ? (Greek Context)?

before TV a comedy routine could be used for years and years in theaters.

TV eats up a lot of material fast and people remember the gags so they

cN NOT EASILY BE RECYCLED.

Greek Old Comedy

For the best answers, search on this site https://shorturl.im/av6sD

Hi Alberich - this seems like a colourful way to start a cold, dreary, wintry Saturday morning in the bookshop! Well, here goes: (I'm a female) 1. Mozart 2. Bach 3. Beethoven 4. Puccini 5. Rachmaninoff 6. Chopin 7. Schubert 8. Tchaikowsky 9. Verdi 10. Ravel 11. Elgar 12. Wagner 13. Brahms 14. Debussy It'll be interesting to see the results of your survey! Hafwen x PS. What is it with the liberal sprinklings of "thumbs down" here for some of our answers???

The comedies of Aristophanes--e. g. The Clouds, The Frogs, Lysistrata--ae examples of Old Comedy. Such comedies are usually social satires and deal with some preposterous way to solve a real and current problem, such as ending the Peloponnesian war (as in Lysistrata). Typically, at the beginning of the play, someone has a crazy idea (like the sex strike in Lysistrata), and people try to put it into effect. They face and defeat opposition, we see the idea working, and the problem is solved--on the stage, if not in real life. Old Comedy is usually also dirty, full of sexual and bathroom humor. And it names names, making jokes about contemporary people who were probably in the audience.

The Peloponnesian War, which Athens lost, put an end to Old Comedy. It was no longer socially acceptable or politically correct--or wise--to write social satire that named names. So New Comedy developed. There was a transitional phase called Middle Comedy, of which Aristophanes' last comedy, Plutus, is the only existing example; and then there were the plays of Menander, which have come down to use only in pieces. Fortunately, the Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence closely imitated Menander, and their comedies give us a pretty good idea what his were like. New Comedies are essentially comedies of manners, most featuring variations of the same plots (boy in love with ineligible girl who turns out to be eligible after all) and stock characters--miser, bragging soldier, young man in love, tricky servant . . . . Sometimes it's hard for a modern reader or viewer to see why these plays are supposed to be funny, but they, not the Old Comedies, are the ancestors of comic theater down until fairly recent times.

Greek New Comedy