Old Comedy

American  

noun

1. Greek comedy of the 5th century b.c., which derived from fertility rites in honor of Dionysus and combined robust humor with biting personal and political satire.

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Etymology

Origin of Old Comedy

First recorded in 1840–50

Example Sentences

Embracing the spirit of Old Comedy, Matt Walker, who adapted and directed this madcap update set in Malibu, encourages his troupe to pull out all the vaudevillian stops.

From Los Angeles Times • Sep. 13, 2021

The longest and wildest of the surviving plays of Aristophanes, the great master of the Old Comedy style, “The Birds” is best known today for introducing “Cloud-cuckoo-land” into our cultural vocabulary.

From New York Times • May 6, 2018

This remarkable and distinctive feature, by-the-bye, of the Old Comedy, the 'Parabasis' to wit, calls for a word of explanation.

From The Eleven Comedies, Volume 1 by Aristophanes

And he was an actor in the Old Comedy, a freedman of that most accomplished king Adrian, and called by him the Attic partridge.

From The Deipnosophists, or Banquet of the Learned of Athen?us by Athen?us

In it Gally, following Casaubon,2 theorizes that the character evolved out of Greek Old Comedy.

From A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) by Chorney, Alexander H.