Tragic madness is hidden from view even though the tragedy is itself enacted in a public space, as ‘space in Greek drama bespeaks the polis, the city, its public character reinforced in its choruses’ (Meisel, 2007: p. 75). This is in contrast to comic madness that is both a spectacle and an auditory phenomenon in that the madness is visible; it is very much an object of spectacle. The dialogue functions both by itself and underlying the spectacle as it does in tragic drama: ‘there in the main to express, to impel, to reveal – express thought and feeling; impel (or defer) changes in condition, situation, and relationship; reveal motives, causes, antecedents, the inner truth or logic of events’ (Meisel, 2007: p. 161). In addition to all these, comedy through language aims at the comic and inelegant, at what is absurd and foolish, at the grotesque in human relationships. No doubt comedy like all theatre is a locus of social if not political (especially in Aristophanes) interaction, and a space for psychological projections, but less an arena of ideas, except in Aristophanes where the political and the conceptual are never far apart. In comedy, madness is visible, it is risible and ludicrous; it is also non-threatening.

There is no explicit manifesto of what constitutes great comedy as there is what good tragedy ought to be like. Aristophanes (ca. 446–386 BC), an acclaimed comic playwright of ancient Greece, did not specifically say what he thought distinguished comedy from tragedy, although he was clearly interested in what counted as good tragedy. In The Frogs (405 BC) he set up a farcical competition between Euripides and Aeschylus. We have Euripides describing what his contribution to tragedy was in comparison to Aeschylus (quotes from Aristophanes are from the 2005 edition):