Nonsense and Laughter in Greek Comedy

The central thesis of this dissertation is that 5th and 4th-century Athenian comedy often renders language meaningless through a variety of devices such as repetition, wordplay, and broken metaphors. Examination is given to Greek words for 'nonsense' like phluaria and leros and their connotations of mental impairment; Greek comedy's tendency to 'break' allegories and metaphors; psychoanalytic theories which relate jokes to children's enjoyment of nonsense (i.e. 'pointless' wordplay and verbal repetition); and the habit of different characters on the comic stage to accuse each other of nonsense-speech. The purpose of this dissertation is to isolate and define what is an often-perceived feature of comedy: that although the genre can be meaningful (i.e. contain political opinions, moral sentiments, etc.), some of it is just 'foolery' or 'fun.' This 'meaningless' part of comedy cannot be equated with its jokes or humor, since these same jokes are often the evidential basis for comic scholarship's 'serious' readings. The answer is to be found in nonsense: by examining the techniques through which comedy attempts not to mean, the genre's relationship to serious meaning (whether it be political, aesthetic, or moral) can be viewed in a clearer light.