ABSTRACT
When I was on the humanities faculty at MIT in the 1970s and 80s, I used to teach a course called “The Nature of Comedy.” One of the critical texts we read was an essay by the esteemed Canadian critic Northrop Frye, who, in discussing classical stage comedy, distinguished between what he called “Old Comedy,” typified in the works of Aristophanes, and the “New Comedy” of Menander, whose plays were produced almost a century later.
