Comedy truly knows no time. With a little bit of historical context, everyone can appreciate the beauty of his plays.

My edition only included The Birds and The Frogs. Gained unwanted insight into the low morals of the Greeks. Wouldn't recommend.

Although such evidence is hardly scientific, I can’t help but think that Aristophanes’s continuing enjoyability of more than two millennia shows something essential about human nature. It’s really incredible, when you think about it. Ancient Athenians, living in a different political system, with an entirely different conception of the world and their place within it, with different customs and rituals, different sexual mores, and far inferior technologies—in short, a set of cultural and environmental circumstances entirely distinct from my own—found the same things funny as do I. That’s either a remarkable testament to some core features of human psychology, or a remarkable coincidence.
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Indeed, so familiar does Aristophanes often seem, that it was often difficult for me to believe he was an Ancient Athenian. Much of his humor is as direct and alive as something I might find if I turned on my television. (At least, I think so; but I can’t be sure, considering how long it’s been since I turned the thing on.) But maybe all this goes to show is that, no matter who you are or where and when you live, fart jokes are funny.
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On second thought, I will temper the above claims about universality, as Aristophanes’s plays are chock-full of contemporary references that cause the modern reader to scratch his head. Aristophanes spends a lot of time mocking his fellow citizens, and often the jokes lose their effect when one isn’t acquainted with the person being mocked. (We have Plato’s dialogues to thank for saving Aristophanes’s jokes at Socrates’s expense.) And the footnotes hardly help in this regard; in fact, I’m not sure any flat joke was ever saved by an informative footnote.
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But for all the provincial references and coarse humor, a startlingly alive portrait of Athenian life does emerge from these plays. Unlike, say, Shakespeare’s comedies, I cannot but help imagine the actors surrounded by bearded Greeks, crippled with laughter, while the actors duly inserted pauses between their lines to let the noise die down. These plays scream out for audience participation; they almost demand raucous shouting from the sidelines. In their best moments, you may even imagine that you, too, are among the shouting fans. With a winking Socrates on your right, and a brooding Euripides on your left, you may add your chuckle to the laughter that echoes through the ages.

Aristophanes

I'm manipulated to believe Greeks are best manipulators out there.

Aristophanes: still hilariously funny.

What a clever play. Aristophanes is a brilliant and witty author.
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the play I read was The Birds. Arrowsmith's translation is superb.

Aristophanes is to the theatre what Homer is to poetry. A bawdy, rollicking, coarse comedy that is screamingly funny. Who says the Ancient Greeks were so upstanding and civilized? Their humour was as rude and crude as that of any contemporary comedian. And this is a case where life imitates art. Well, it took thousands of years, but the women of Iceland went on strike for equal wages to their male counterparts (SPOILER: they won). I can only imagine some of the conversations around the dinner tables were similar in tone to that of Lysistrata and her sisters as they withdraw sex in order to end the decades-long Peloponnesian war. Okay, Iceland never went to war like that, but still. The women made their point.
My copy came from Gutenberg Press and is part of my project to read through Mort Adler's Great Books.

The Frogs has one of the best lines in Greek Lit. But the line, as well as most of Aristophanes's work, is NSFW.

My favorite is Lysistrata, and I enjoyed The Clouds - which is a satire on Socrates.

# 11 of 133 on Clifton Fadiman's New Lifetime Reading Plan.

I keep being told that if I'm a cultured and wise man, I will love aristophanes, but he just seems crass and not that entertaining to be honest. Maybe groundbreaking for his time but compare him to later playwrights like Shakespeare and he pales in comparison.

I accidentally chose the wrong four plays on Goodreads, as I read Four COMEDIES of Aristophanes, not Four Plays. But two of those comedies were Lysistrata and The Frogs so I'll go with it anyway. These plays are full of ribaldry and off color jokes, not really Safe For Work. As with most plays they really need to be seen performed instead of read, as there is much physical comedy involved. Also would help to be an Athenian from 5th century B.C. Greece, as these were written during the Peloponnesian War and contain many topical references to local places, persons, and events. Also there are many jokes and especially puns which do not translate at all well from the Ancient Greek. The plays I read were all anti-war pieces, all contained much sexual reference, and all contained blatant insult to Euripides, who apparently had an ongoing feud with Aristophanes.

The translators do their best with varied success. All are rendered into American English with the jokes altered to make them more understandable. As these plays were written for Athenians all the foreigners represented speak with noticeable accents, usually uneducated or effeminate, and the Spartans, Athens main enemy, is treated particularly harshly.

Lysistrata
The women of Athens go on strike to end the war. They withhold sex from their men until they declare peace, also occupying the treasury so the soldiers cannot be paid. Much wordplay and physical representations of phalluses and female genitalia as the men of Athens and Sparta are forced to end the war as they cannot continue fighting due to their engorged phalluses. The women are not spared, as Lysistrata has trouble keeping her women in line because they too are extremely horny. The Spartans in this piece are portrayed as country bumpkins and speak like Brer Rabbit from Uncle Remus.

The Frogs
Dionysus goes to Hades to collect the best playwright to bring back to Athens because all the good speakers are dead. Dionysus convinces Pluto to let him judge a competition between the best two available, Euripides (recently deceased) and Aeschylus. They start a kind of rap battle, where Aeschylus is accused of being wordy and pedantic, with all his works being about Heroes and Gods and ungrounded ideals, while Euripides is accused of being bucolic and base, his plays dealing with more mortal problems. Dionysus picks a winner to go home and increase the morale of the Athenians during a period where they are being hard pressed by the Spartans.

The Congresswomen
The women of Athens disguise themselves as men and go to the Assembly and vote themselves into power to end war. They set up a Utopian communist rule with free housing, free food, and free love. The problems that result are played out as some men are against sharing their goods, and mostly by a group of hideous hags who accost a handsome young man demanding their share of free love. Some discussion of economic theory and a lot of sex jokes.

The Acharnians
An old farmer conscripted to sentry duty on the walls of Athens decides he wants to go home. He returns to his farm and declares it a neutral territory with a free market open to all except politicians. The police come to collect him and he goes to see his buddy Euripides to borrow some props and lift some parts from his plays to confound the police. Euripides is again treated badly, shown as a lazy hoarder who is ill tempered and can't be bothered to get up off his couch. People from other nations come to the new market and the farmer becomes rich collecting more food than he can eat and a bag full of underaged girls. While he spends his time surrounded by food, fortune, and dancing girls the soldiers are shown to be going off to the frozen frontier to sleep on the ground and eat hard tack.