This monograph is a revised version of S.'s 2016 thesis, which explores ‘what jokes in poetry, and indeed jokes as poetry, can tell us about poetry’ (p. 2). The overall answer/argument is that jokes in Greek comedy amplify – the verb is heavily repeated throughout the book – the incongruities and absurdity (defamiliarisation) inherent to all poetic representation (mimesis), and thus comedy exposes tragedy as no less ridiculous than itself. In the introduction S. explains what jokes and poetry (or metaphor, which is poetry's trope par excellence) have in common: both are non-standard modes of speech that mobilise the unexpected, the implausible and the deceptive; they both draw attention to their linguistic form; and they are both characterised by interpretative openness. This kinship allows jokes to speak for poetry altogether, even for ‘serious’ poetry, whose pretentiousness they come to reveal. Such metapoetic jokes in comedy are not restricted to paratragic passages and the parabases, S. clarifies, but can be found even in seemingly irrelevant contexts (pp. 10–11). S. also provides a brief overview of the incongruity-based humour theories from Aristotle to Oring; the most pertinent to S.'s analysis is Schopenhauer's account, i.e. that humour arises from – hence jokes invest in – the realisation of the gap between reality and representations of it (pp. 9–10, 18, 40, 122).

The first chapter, ‘Jokes and Poetic Language’, opens by specifying the affinity of jokes to metaphors: they both entail an absurd connection of disparate semantic domains. It is only that jokes highlight that absurdity as such. For example, a commonplace poetic metaphor since Homer was to compare speech to liquids (e.g. sweet words to honey), but several puns in comedy entail a comparison of speaking individuals to liquids, for example Paphlagon to a boiling torrent (Aristophanes, Knights 919–22) or Archilochus to pickle-juice (Cratinus, fr. 6.1 K.-A.). Thus comedy makes concrete what in the poetic tradition is abstract, to bring ‘before our eyes’ its ridiculousness. Such a confrontation is also made possible by jokes that entail excess of imagery or multiple double entendres; for example, in Clouds 1088–94 the generic insult εὐρύπρωκτος, ‘wide-arseholed / bugger’, ostentatiously wavers between its metaphorical and literal sense (pp. 32–3). Here I missed some contextualising: what anatomical metaphors for one's morality are employed by ‘serious’ poetry, to which εὐρύπρωκτος may be (cor)responding? The second half of the chapter shifts focus onto puns that mock the falseness of poetic ekphrases. By such puns the comic poets nod to the physical unreality of their dramatic landscapes / the technical limitations of any theatrical production, even though they promise their spectators all kinds of fantastical sights. Comedy is led to question the quality of thereness that ekphrases claim to have, because in tragedy the most crucial developments in a plot happen off-stage and the spectators are left only with lengthy narratives, meant to be taken ‘seriously’. So does Peisetairos/Aristophanes build his Cloud-cuckoo-land out of … thin air, joking about the unreality of his own creation – I endorse S.'s proposal (p. 51) that the ‘baked bricks’ of Peisetairos’ wall in Birds 552 is a pun on ‘visible bricks’ (ὀπτός < ἕψω vs ὀπτός < ὁράω).

The second chapter, ‘Jokes and Dramatic Performance’, deals with puns that dismantle the utterly non-naturalistic and hyper-stylised theatrical code. A good deal of jokes cluster around non-human roles, such as animals or abstract concepts, and those jokes come to emphasise the human identity of the actors. For example, the fish-chorus of Archippus’ Fishes are described as γαλεoί, ‘dogfish’, which hints at Γαλεῶται, a Sicilian clan of soothsayers (fr. 15 K.-A.). This is a ‘fairly terrible’ pun – ‘plastic sturgeons’ is an apt rendering by I. Storey, we read in the endnotes –, and it is consciously so, S. suggests; for the ‘groin-inducing awfulness’ of the pun matches the embarrassing costumes of the chorus: the gap between human- and fish-anatomy means that any costume would look terribly unnatural (pp. 61, 63). Especially with roles of personified (as females) abstract concepts, such as Reconciliation in Lysistrata, Theoria in Peace or Music in Pherecrates’ Chiron, sexual puns come to visualise the harassing of their tangible bodies: nothing abstract. Of course, to personify something abstract is in itself a ridiculous enterprise, Aristophanes admits in Clouds 340–5: he makes no attempt to make the chorus meaningfully cloud-like, but conveniently (and self-embarrassingly) describes them as shape-shifters. A metatheatrical potential is also found in jokes about the use of the mechane and the ekkyklema, whose real/technical existence is ignored by tragedy, yet loved by comedy. For example, in fr. 4 K.-A. by Strattis a character complains about his hanging from a κράδη, which means a ‘branch’, but also the mechane. Whereas tragedy wishes to disavow the gap between fictionality and performance, comedy manifests its willingness to embrace that gap, S. concludes.

The final chapter, ‘Jokes and Storytelling’, looks at how comedy employs jokes to undermine traditional storytelling, such as tragic plots, epic narratives and historiographical aetiologies. Mythological comedies offer an excellent opportunity for such parody, for they mobilise comedy's topicality and hyper-materiality (e.g. through the focus on the grubbiest of everyday objects or through sexual innuendo) to underscore the unnatural loftiness of serious storytelling. The eponymous protagonists of Cratinus’ Dionysalexandros (a god-hero hybrid) and of Aristophanes’ Aeolosicon (a god-chef hybrid) epitomise this merge of incompatible ‘scripts’ and attract many jokes on their questionable nature: the coinage σκοροδομίμητος, ‘garlic-masquerading’, in the latter play (Ar. fr. 5 K.-A.) is telling. Quite often comic poets invest this gap between reality and myth with political satire, in what S. calls a ‘comic triangulation’ (p. 109); for example, Dionysalexandros was a satire for how Pericles had brought war upon the Athenians. Yet the most interesting and original idea in this chapter is that, whereas serious storytelling is structured upon the highly artificial principle of linear and predictable causality (κατὰ τὸ εἰκὸς ἢ τὸ ἀναγκαῖον, for tragedy in particular), comedy, rather paradoxically, proves more naturalistic in that it embraces haphazardness. At the same time, comedy amplifies single-factor causality – an entire comic plot may revolve around a single gag – to expose the antirealism of traditional storytelling (pp. 89–91, 113).

The book's tripartite structure (i.e. jokes about language, about performance and about plot) is economical and covers the most prevalent aspects of drama. With a main body of 123 pages, concise notes reserved for the end, simple yet precise writing style, translations for all Greek passages, generous indexes and meticulous copy-editing, the book is an epitome of reader-friendliness. It is neither too theoretical nor too technical, and the commentary on individual jokes (featuring several original proposals) serves perfectly S.'s argumentation. However, not all jokes discussed are puns in the strict sense (paronomasia / double-meaning) – very few are puns in the last chapter – nor will readers find a typology of jokes. S. has updated the bibliography since 2016, but this is done somewhat superficially, in the form of passing mentions in the introduction or citations for further reading, while the analysis does not engage critically with some recent works that are relevant and would have been useful (e.g. the essays in P. Swallow and E. Hall's Aristophanic Humour [2020]; C. Jendza's Paracomedy [2020]; and my own Aristophanes and the Poetics of Surprise [2020] – the latter two are not listed). Of older scholarship, the most striking omission for a book interested in poetic absurdity is that of P. Cartledge's Aristophanes and his Theatre of the Absurd (1990). Any minor reservations aside, this is a well-researched and well-written contribution on the competitive attitude of comedy towards tragedy, and also (what should be a gauge of success for such books) it is fun to read.