Comedy: Greece and Rome to Hollywood

Bibliography on Aspects of Comedy

Plot and Structure

Dover, Kenneth. 1972. "Structure and Style." In Aristophanic Comedy. California. 66-72.

Aristotle, Poetics 49b25-54a15

Anderson, W. S. 1993. "Plautus' Plotting: The Lover Upstaged." In Barbarian Play: Plautus' Roman Comedy. Toronto. 60-78.

Character

Whitman, C. 1964. "Comic Heroism." In Aristophanes and the Comic Hero. Harvard. 21-58.

Aristotle, Poetics 50b1-20, 54a15-54b18; Reconstruction of Poetics II, 4.1.2

Duckworth, George. 1952. "Character and Characterization." In The Nature of Roman Comedy. Princeton. 236-71.

Anderson, W. S. 1993. "Plautus' Characters and Themes." In Barbarian Play: Plautus' Roman Comedy. Toronto. 88-106.

Wiles, David. The Masks of Menander.

Music

Dover, Kenneth. 1972. "Lyric Stanzas." In Aristophanic Comedy. California. 68-72.

Wiles, David. 2000. "The aulos-player." In Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction. Cambridge. 144-47.

Csapo, Eric and William J. Slater. 1995. "Music" and "The Chorus." In The Context of Ancient Drama. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press. 331-68.

Moore, Timothy J. 1999. "Facing the Music: Character and Musical Accompaniment in Roman Comedy." Syllecta Classica 10: 130-53. 882.009 C884 1999

Moore, Timothy J. "Music and Structure in Roman Comedy." American Journal of Philology 119 (1998) 245-73.

Marshall, C. W. 2006. "Music and Metre." The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy. Cambridge. 203-44.

Humor

Aristotle, Reconstruction of Poetics II, 3.2.1-2, The Laughable

Noel Carroll, "Notes on the Sight Gag," in Andrew S. Horton, ed. Comedy/Cinema/Theory, 25-42.

Jeffrey Henderson, "The Dramatic Function of Obscenity in the Plays of Aristophanes: Clouds," 70-78 from The Maculate Muse.

Ramona Curry, "Goin' to Town and Beyond: Mae West, Film Censorship and the Comedy of Unmarriage," in Classical Hollywood Comedy, pp. 211-37

Duckworth, George. 1952. "Language and Style." In The Nature of Roman Comedy. Princeton. 331-60.

Gender

Wiles, David. 2000. "Gender." In Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction. Cambridge. 66-89, esp. 66-70, 73-86

Zweig, Bella. 1992. "The Mute Nude Female Characters in Aristophanes' Plays." In Amy Richlin, ed. Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome. Oxford. 73-89.

Helene Foley, "The Female Intruder Reconsidered: Women in Aristophanes' Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae." Classical Philology 77 (1982) 1-21 (esp. section about Lysistrata)

Christopher Faraone, "Priestess and Courtesan: The Ambivalence of Female Leadership in Aristophanes' Lysistrata," in C. Faraone and L. McClure, eds., Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World (Wisconsin 2006) 207-23.

Madeleine Henry, "Ethos, Mythos, Praxis: Women in Menander's Comedy," Helios (1986) 141-149, and Tina Olsen Lent, "Romantic Love and Friendship: The Redefinition of Gender Relations in Screwball Comedy," in Classical Hollywood Comedy, pp. 314-31.

Kathleen Rowe, "Comedy, Melodrama, and Gender: Theorizing the Genres of Laughter," in Classical Hollywood Comedy

Ethnicity and Orientalism

Patterson, Cynthia. "Other Sorts: Slaves, Foreigners, and Women in Periclean Athens." In L. J. Samons, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Pericles. Cambridge. 153-78.

Hall, Jonathan. 2002. "The Barbarian Enters the Stage." In Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture. Chicago. 172-89.

Moore, Timothy J. 1998. "Greece or Rome?" In The Theater of Plautus: Playing to the Audience. Texas. 50-66.

Starks, John H., Jr. 2000. "Nullus Me Est Hodie Poenus Poenior: Balanced Ethnic Humor in Plautus' Poenulus." Helios 27.2: 163-86.

George Fredric Franko. 1996. "The Characterization of Hanno in Plautus' Poenulus." American Journal of Philology 117: 425-452.

Matthew Leigh. 2004. "Plautus and Hannibal." In Comedy and the Rise of Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 24-56.

Winokur, Mark. 1985. "Smile, Stranger: Aspects of Immigrant Humor in the Marx Brothers' Humor." Literature/Film Quarterly 13: 161-71.

Actor/Spectator

Dover, Kenneth. 1972. "Illusion, Instruction and Entertainment." In Aristophanic Comedy. California. 49-65, esp. 49-53 and 55-59.

Niall Slater, "Convention and Reaction," 147-67, and "The Ruse of Persia--or--The Story-Telling Slaves," 37-54, from Plautus in Performance (Princeton 1985).

Moore, Timothy J. 1998. "Characters and Spectators." In The Theater of Plautus: Playing to the Audience. Texas. 24-49.