Anecdotes in which Philemon dies laughing are difficult to believe; he was a poet of New Comedy, which was no great laughing matter. If Old Comedy can be described as ‘men dressed up being funny’, a century later the new type had evolved into something like Euripides-and-water. If we are disappointed to find that Menander is lacking in hilarity, perhaps we have been misled by his successors, from Molière to Alan Ayckbourn. Humour was not his first priority.

John Fletcher might have been referring to New Comedy when he said, ‘A tragi-comedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy, which must be a representation of familiar people, with such kind of trouble as no life be questioned.’ In Menander's Aspis (The Shield), the bloated corpse which Daos mistakes for his master's, and the covetous gloating of Smikrines, the young man's uncle, set a sombre mood from which the play does not easily break free. Circumstances in Samia are similar to those which lead to the katastrophe in Hippolytos, and Demeas uses Euripidean language to express his emotion. The people of New Comedy may meet with real harm and genuine distress, for its themes play upon avarice, misanthropy and loneliness, love, loss, jealousy and, of course, the rapes of maidens. ‘As Tragedy was becoming more deliberately artificial, less natural in appearance, Comedy was moving towards taking over the ground of creating situations, through so-called “situation-comedy” that the ordinary man-in-the-audience could relate to from his own experience. This too must have been seen as startlingly new.’