Humor y puesta en escena en la comedia de Aristófanes

Presentado en las Jornadas sobre "El humor (y los humores) en el mundo antiguo", organizado por el Departamento de Estudios Clásicos y el Instituto de Ciencias de la Antigüedad de la UPV y celebrado en Vitoria-Gasteiz los días 16 y 17 de octubre de 2007.

This article explores the stagecraft in Aristophanes's plays as a source of laugther. With this aim, some passages are analyzed where the comicity arises mainly from the staging, either through the costumes, masks, props, and gestures, or by the stage action. Special attention is paid to a typical feature of aristophanic theatre, which is an expression of the «open» structure of this kind of comedy: the accumulation of exits and entrances of characters within a brief passage. The author establishes a correlation between this feature and Bergson’s modern theory of laughter, and emphasizes that it is very much alive in today's comedy, by providing examples from the cinema.