Beyond a Joke: Making Humour Theory Work with Aristophanes

In the thirty years since the foundation of the journal Humor unified the interdisciplinary conversation on humour research, the dialogue between Aristophanic scholarship and contemporary humour theory has remained limited – in part out of a sense among Aristophanists that, notwithstanding the major advances in the first half of this period, the current state of theory is not yet up to the task of close-reading the working complexities of humour in the Aristophanic text. An unpacking of the layers of comic effect in a single line suggests ways in which consideration of how Aristophanes can help humour theory with some of the challenges with which it continues to struggle in attempting to scale up joke-based semantic models of humour to extended comic texts and sequences, arguing that mainstream humour theory has fundamentally neglected the role of theory of mind in the cognitive machinery of humour.