Christopher Hampton's The Philanthropist, seen in relation to its source, Molière's The Misanthrope, provides not only a modern commentary on that play but an insight into the nature of comic mimesis. Though startlingly different in most respects, the two plays present us with ‘unrealistic’ extremes which are simply distortions of tendencies we can see both in our society and in our selves. Such distortions are comic in that the audience perceives the disparity between the action and what would ordinarily occur in reality, but the distortions pose no threat to laughter because of the author's careful control of the context in which they occur.