I don't want the Greeks brought to me, I want to be brought to the Greeks. If you modernise so much, and add all sorts of bits of your own invention, just to make a potentially "performable" play for a modern audience, what is left? I want the strangeness, the oddness, the Otherness....that is the whole point for me of reading this sort of thing...

Strepsiades:
(Pointing to other students who are bent completely double.)
Hey, and look there what are those fellows doing bent over like that?

Student:
Those are graduate students doing research on Hades.

Strepsiades:
On Hades? Then why are their asses scanning the skies?

Student:
Taking a minor in Astronomy.

from “The Clouds”, p. 36

There's really 4 works here, so 4 reviews there must be (from best to worse, IMHO):

Lysistrata 2 Thumbs Up
Brilliant, original (at ~2500 years old, it should be!) concept, and humorously executed. Athenian and Spartan women plot to withhold sex from the men to force an end to the disastrous and interminable Peloponnesian War. Great to see strong females at this early stage.

The Birds 1.5 Thumbs Up
Again, great concept. Athenians wish to escape litigious Athens and live the simpler life amongst the Birds. Instead they are unable to overcome their insuperable human instincts for advancement and ending creating a kingdom and, through wily machinations, wresting the scepter of heaven from Zeus. A little heavy on the slapstick for my taste. Would make for a good play what with the bird costumes and elaborate songs.

The Frogs 1 Thumb Up
The important bit of this is a contest in Hades between Euripides and Aeschylus to determine which was the greater poet, considering their message, style, philosophy, rhyme and meter. Poetry professors may love it; for me, it was a bit dry. Intelligent stuff, though, and I'm sure in Greek it must be trebly so.

The Clouds 2 Leather Phalli Way Down.
Kind of a silly preconceived notion, but I didn't expect so much scatological humor from classical authors. Aristophanes likes to make full use of fart jokes and phalli (well, leather ones, on his actors, as was apparently not unusual among Old Comedy at the time). Classic or not, it doesn't really amuse me. Most importantly, he either grossly misunderstands or slanders Socrates (portraying him as a ridiculous charlatan and Sophist). Word on the street is that this play may have contributed to the trial and forced suicide of my man Socrates. Two thumbs down.

There was a lot of background I didn’t understand. Many things were just hilarious!
“Lost his little bottle of oil”
(Great Books group)

Aristophanes. Four Plays: The Clouds, The Birds, Lysistrata, and The Frogs. 1983. Translated by William Arrowsmith, Richmond Lattimore, and Douglass Parker. Penguin, 1990.
Translating comedy is harder than translating tragedy. This is especially so with a playwright like Aristophanes, whose culture is so distant from our own. I cannot imagine that anyone will ever translate The Birds more effectively than William Arrowsmith, whom I once heard explain the concepts of hybris and sophrosyne with a clarity, depth, and passion that I will never forget. Even so, when we laugh at elements of these plays, I wonder if we are laughing at the same jokes the 5th C. BCE Athenians heard. In The Birds, when the goddess Iris shows up without the proper paperwork to get by the gate erected by the birds and is threatened with death, she says, “I can’t die.” The Athenian at the gate tells her, “Well, you damn well should.” The joke cannot mean for us what it meant for the Athenian audience. In none of the plays can we forget that Athens is losing a war that lasted more than a quarter of a century. The Clouds shows us that Knights are not what they once were. The arrogance of the Athenian empire is mirrored by the arrogance of the birds and their human allies. How are we to respond, and how differently would the Athenian audience have responded, to the sex strike in the name of peace in Lysistrata? Finally, in The Frogs, there seems to be such a desperate search for a strategy that the play has to resurrect two dead tragedians for advice that seems wholly inadequate. Five stars.

Pisthetairos: “First, we’ll give our city
some highfalutin’ name. Then a special sacrifice
to our new gods.”
…
Koryphaios: “To work. men. How do you propose to name our city?”
…
Euelpides: “Something big, smacking
of the clouds. A pinch of fluff and rare air
A swollen sound.”
Pisthetairos: “I’ve got it! Listen—
. CLOUDCUCKOOLAND!”
Koryphaios: “That’s it! The perfect name. And it’s a big word too.”
Euelpides: “CLOUDCUCKOOLAND!
Imagination’s happy home,
where Theogenes builds castles in the air, and Aischines becomes a millionaire.”
- The Birds

Well, of course, after reading Doerr’s book Cloud Cuckoo Land I had to read the source for the germ of his idea and his title. And I’m glad Arrowsmith “refused on principle to bowdlerize.” And I’m happy he updated some of the jokes, and explained why and what in his end notes.

This is hilariously funny - I think there’s no one, particularly no one in authority, that Aristophanes leaves unskewered.

Pisthetairos: “And we’re in luck. The feast of poultry I’ve prepared will grace our wedding supper.”

Although I am a student of classical antiquity, and studied classical Greek in college, I have never been able to work up more than an academic interest in Aristophanes. While I can see the importance of his work - both as a social commentary on the Athens of the fifth-century BCE, and as a cornerstone of the comedic tradition in Western drama - I have never truly been able to ENJOY his plays. I was surprised therefore, by how much I liked the production of The Frogs that I recently saw performed here in NY by the Greek Cultural Center (good job, George!). Concluding that comedy is far more difficult to convey by text alone than is tragedy, as it relies upon the visual and auditory components of the play to a greater degree, I decided to dig out one of my old college books, and give the "comic master" another try.

My project met with the predictable mixed results. While my appreciation of The Frogs (translated in this collection by Richmond Lattimore) was noticeably greater this time around, I still found myself mostly indifferent to the three other works in this anthology. While it is certainly interesting to read another perspective on the famed Socrates (and there is some debate as to how Aristophanes intended his parody to be taken), my greatest enjoyment of The Clouds was in reading William Arrowsmith's commentary on his various decisions as translator. The same holds true of The Birds, also translated by Arrowsmith, which despite its status as the playwright's masterpiece, has always struck me as somewhat dreary. As for Lysistrata, here translated by Douglass Parker, although I have read it many times over the years, I never fail to find its portrayal of women extremely creepy.

All of which is to say: Aristophanes is not for me... Still, no student of classical Greek literature and history can afford to ignore so celebrated an author. For this reason, and because I find Aristophanes fascinating, even when I do not enjoy him, I recommend these works (and this translation) to all...

Aristophanes, like Ovid, is funny and coarse. A lot of his jokes and sly little remarks would make my mother blush some 2500 years after he wrote these plays. How can you not love a guy like that?

For class purposes we only read The Clouds and The Frogs, both of which I greatly enjoyed. Someday I will read the rest.

i loved this in college. i need to reread this.

The Frogs is laugh-out-loud funny, even in 2008.

Funny in a Greek kind of way, especially Lysistrata.