#10 Humor As Resistance: Lessons from Ancient Greece

In this episode, I trace the origins of humor as a tool of political resistance to fifth-century Athens, where the playwright Aristophanes used comedy to mock warmongering leaders, puncture male vanity, and make the case for peace — in front of thousands of citizens, at the height of a ruinous war. 

Drawing on the history of Aristophanes' two great anti-war plays — The Knights and Lysistrata — the episode explores what humor can do that marches, lawsuits, and arguments alone cannot: name the absurdity, puncture the posture of power, and give people permission to say out loud what they already know.

But the Athens story is not a simple triumph. It raises harder questions too. Did the humor actually change anything? Whose interests did it serve? And what does it mean that tyrant was mocked brilliantly yet remained in power? 

Mark Twain, writing in the voice of Satan, put the challenge directly: "Your race has one really effective weapon — laughter. You leave it lying rusting. You lack sense and the courage."

This episode begins the quest to understand how humor can be used as an effective tool for change. 

Transcript

LAUGHTER AS RESISTANCE: LESSONS FROM ANCIENT GREECE

INTRODUCTION

Hi. This is Michael C. Patterson. Welcome to the Flourish In Times of Struggle podcast.

This series is an invitation to think together about how older adults can stay steady, compassionate, and engaged at a time when cruelty, corruption, and division have become increasingly normalized. My hope is that together we can prepare ourselves for hard but necessary conversations — with our families, our communities, and our neighbors — and for the small but meaningful actions this moment requires. Because I believe we can still envision, and work toward, a future in which we and our grandchildren flourish with dignity and purpose.

In this episode I want to explore humor as a tool of resistance — its power, its limits, and its long history as one of the most versatile and most underused tools in the history of political resistance. To do that, we are going to travel back in time — all the way to ancient Athens, where political satire and democracy grew up together, and where the lessons we need most urgently right now were first learned and first forgotten.

Mark Twain called humor and laughter a weapon. I think of it as a tool — something we build with as well as fight with. Either way, his point stands. Writing in the voice of Satan — a cold, clear-eyed observer who has watched the human race across the full sweep of history, cataloguing its failures, its self-deceptions, and its squandered capacities with weary contempt — Twain chides us for leaving this particular tool lying rusting:

Satan says, “For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon — laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution — these can lift at a colossal humbug — push it a little — weaken it a little, century by century: but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons. Do you ever use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting. As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage."

That last sentence is the challenge this episode accepts. Do we have the sense and the courage to use humor as a tool of resistance?

ONE: WHERE POLITICAL SATIRE WAS BORN — ATHENS AND THE GREEKS

Political satire and democracy grew up together — in the same place, from the same impulse. It is not a coincidence.

In fifth century Athens, the festival of Dionysus was the cultural event of the year — a multi-day celebration of theater, attended by the entire city, including prisoners released for the occasion. The festival began with tragedies — Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus — three days of suffering, divine wrath, and human folly played out on an enormous scale. But after the tragedies came something else entirely.

Satyr plays. They were comic afterpieces performed by actors dressed as satyrs, which were half-human, half-goat creatures associated with Dionysus, god of wine, ecstasy, and the dissolution of normal order. Where the tragedies had treated the great myths with reverence and terror, the satyr plays treated the same material with bawdy irreverence. The sacred stories were subjected to mockery. The heroes were made ridiculous. Nothing was too serious to be laughed at.

This was not incidental. It was structural. Those of you who have followed this series will recognize the parallel immediately: the Greeks understood that a culture needs both Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo is the ordering, rationalizing, abstracting impulse — the left hemisphere impulse — that builds systems, categories, and institutions. Dionysus is the embodied, ecstatic, irreverent impulse — the right hemisphere impulse — that dissolves rigid categories and reconnects us to direct living experience. 

Too much Apollo produces rigidity, humorlessness, the inability to see one's own absurdity — the closed, infallible system that cannot correct itself. Too much Dionysus produces chaos. The festival required both — tragedy and satyr play, reverence and mockery, held in deliberate balance.

Aristophanes — the great comic playwright of the period — took this license to what some might call dangerous lengths. He wrote comedies that mocked specific living politicians by name, at the height of their power, in front of an audience of thousands. He was not writing from safety. He was performing an act of political courage — naming the absurdities of power in a room full of people who had the power to punish him for it. And he kept writing — for decades, through wars and peace negotiations and catastrophic military defeats — sustained by the conviction that humor could do something that serious argument alone could not.

Two of his plays are particularly relevant to our argument today — and they work together in an instructive way, separated by thirteen years of history.

THE KNIGHTS

The first is The Knights, written in 424 BCE. It was Aristophanes' sustained, full-throated attack on a single politician: Cleon — a populist leader who had built his power through popular anger and contempt for the established elite. The play made a specific accusation: that Cleon was prolonging the Peloponnesian War against Sparta for his own political survival — that he feared prosecution once peace returned and had deliberately sabotaged Sparta's peace offer to protect himself. The audience who laughed at these accusations were not laughing at abstractions. They were Athenians whose sons had died in the war, whose farms had been burned during Spartan invasions, who were paying the taxes that funded year after year of inconclusive fighting. The humor took the real situation — a leader prolonging a ruinous war for personal survival — and followed its internal logic to a conclusion that made the absurdity undeniable. The laughter was real. The grief behind it was real.

Aristophanes' comic device was as savage as it was precise. He portrayed Athens itself as a gullible old man — called Demos, meaning simply "The People" — who had fallen completely under the spell of a manipulative flatterer. The only way to defeat Cleon, the play suggested, was to find someone even more shameless, more vulgar, and more willing to outflatter and outshout him. A sausage seller — the lowest trade in Athens — was chosen for the job. The joke was the argument: democracy had been so debased by demagoguery that the only available remedy was more demagoguery. Sound familiar?

The Knights won first prize at the Lenaea in 424 BCE. Yet, Cleon remained in power. The humor named the problem without solving it. We will return to Cleon shortly — because his story contains some of the most important and most uncomfortable lessons in this episode.

But first — the second play. Lysistrata was written thirteen years later, in 411 BCE. Thirteen years of war. A brief peace — the Peace of Nicias — that had collapsed almost immediately. And then the catastrophic Sicilian Expedition, in which Athens sent a massive fleet to conquer Sicily and lost it almost entirely — ships, soldiers, and treasure destroyed in one of the worst military disasters in Greek history. The very catastrophe Aristophanes had warned against, promoted by the very demagogue — Alcibiades — who had filled the vacuum left by Cleon's death.

And yet Aristophanes was still writing. Still arguing for peace. Still using humor as his tool.

LYSTISTRATA

Lysistrata — which we explored in our episode on boycotts, but which belongs here too — imagined women from both sides of the conflict organizing a sex strike and seizing the state treasury until the men made peace. It is simultaneously one of the world's earliest recorded boycotts and one of the most enduring examples of humor as political resistance. 

The play takes a real situation — men prolonging a war while women bear its consequences — and follows that logic to its irreverent extreme: the women simply withhold what the men most desire. And in doing so, they force the men to admit something that no political argument could have extracted from them — that women hold enormous power, that male authority is undone by male desire, and that the gap between the public performance of masculine strength and the private reality of masculine vulnerability is very, very funny.

It is worth noting — because it connects to our both-sides argument about humor — that Lysistrata is not simply a feminist play. Aristophanes gave women a powerful political argument while simultaneously using them as comic figures, reinforcing stereotypes about female irrationality even as he dramatized female courage. The tool of humor served liberation —and reinforced existing hierarchies simultaneously. Humor is rarely pure.

The comedy was the argument. The laughter was the tool. And Aristophanes had been making the same argument, through the same tool, for thirteen years — through wars and peace negotiations and catastrophic defeats — without giving up.

That persistence is itself a lesson worth sitting with before we turn to what those thirteen years of history actually produced.

And here the fuller story is more nuanced — giving us a more honest and more useful understanding of humor as a tool of resistance. Because the question is not just whether humor works. It is who is using it, against whom, and in whose interests.

WHO IS USING HUMOR, AGAINST WHOM, AND IN WHOSE INTERESTS

Aristophanes and Thucydides — our two primary sources on Cleon — were both members of the Athenian aristocratic class. The Encyclopaedia Britannica notes directly that neither can be considered an unprejudiced witness. The historical record is less tidy than Aristophanes' portrait suggests. 

Cleon was the first prominent Athenian politician to rise to power from outside the established elite — the son of a tanner, representing the commercial class and the poor. He raised jury pay — a genuine economic reform that gave ordinary Athenians a livelihood. He won real military victories. He gave voice to the frustrations of people the aristocracy had long ignored. He also — like so many who have followed him — seemed to succumb to the corrupting influence of the power that Athens' flawed democratic system made available to him. He used the courts to remove rivals. He proposed massacring the population of Mytilene. He sabotaged peace negotiations for personal political survival.

This complexity reveals something essential about humor as a political tool: it is available to both sides. It can be used by those challenging power or by those defending it. It can give voice to the powerless or serve the interests of the privileged. It can puncture false claims to power — or it can reinforce existing hierarchies, dismiss legitimate grievances, and make the powerful comfortable laughing at those beneath them. 

And at its most dangerous, humor has been deployed as a tool of dehumanization and demonization — the antisemitic caricature, the minstrel show, the mockery of the disabled and the vulnerable. These are not aberrations. They are humor used as a weapon of oppression rather than liberation — precisely the mechanism we explored in our earlier episode on the Political Dehumanization Template.

Aristophanes mocking Cleon was, at least in part, an aristocrat mocking a populist who had raised wages for the poor. The freedom to mock is not inherently progressive. The difference between humor as liberation and humor as oppression is not in the tool itself. It is in the purpose it serves. Are we using laughter to puncture false claims to power — to name what is actually happening and make it impossible to look away from? Or are we using it to reinforce existing hierarchies, to dismiss legitimate grievances, to dehumanize those who are already vulnerable?

These are questions any campaign of political humor must be willing to ask of itself — honestly and repeatedly.

And then there is the deeper lesson — the one that connects most directly to our own moment. The peace that followed Cleon's death did not last. Six years later Athens launched the catastrophic Sicilian Expedition, under the charismatic and reckless Alcibiades, and the broader war was eventually lost. The underlying conditions that had made Cleon possible — the flawed democratic institutions, the susceptibility to demagogues, the absence of structural protections against the concentration of popular power — remained entirely intact. Alcibiades exploited exactly the same vulnerabilities. Cleon had been removed. The system that produced him had not been reformed or redesigned.

WHAT THE GREEK EXAMPLE TEACHES US

Democracies need effective self-correction mechanisms — feedback loops that prevent power from drifting into corruption, rigidity, and self-delusion. Humor is one of those mechanisms. But understanding how it works requires distinguishing between two different kinds of corrective loop.

The first loop is the one humor is uniquely equipped to activate. It identifies the flaw — the corruption, the hypocrisy, the gap between what power claims and what it actually does — and makes it visible. It names it publicly. It gives that naming social legitimacy and emotional resonance. It creates the shared recognition that something is wrong, that the emperor has no clothes, that the official story cannot be taken seriously. This is what Aristophanes did in the Theater of Dionysus. This is what the Orange Alternative did in the streets of Warsaw. This is what a well-aimed joke does in a crowded room. The first loop — recognize, name, and expose the hypocrisy and the lies, and legitimize the criticism — this is where humor is does it’s most important work.

The second feedback loop is where humor confronts its limit. Identifying the flaw is not the same as fixing it. Naming the corruption is not the same as dismantling the system that enables it. Making the emperor's nakedness visible is not the same as removing him from the throne — let alone building institutions that prevent the next emperor from arising. The second loop requires organized, sustained, collective action. It requires the construction of better systems. It requires — in the language we have learned from Timothy Snyder — not just Negative Freedom, freedom from the immediate oppression, but Positive Freedom: the active, deliberate work of building democratic institutions that are genuinely resistant to capture by the next demagogue.

Aristophanes activated the first loop brilliantly. Athens never fully activated the second. The result was that every gain was temporary — every demagogue replaced by another, every peace followed by another war, until the democracy that had produced the greatest political satire in human history finally collapsed under the weight of its own unreformed vulnerabilities.

The lesson is not that humor is insufficient and therefore useless. It is that humor is necessary but not sufficient — and that understanding exactly what it can and cannot do is what allows us to use it wisely, in combination with the other tools that the second loop requires.

CONCLUSION

In our next episode, we leave ancient Athens and enter the medieval court — where humor was employed, contained, and co-opted by the very power it was supposed to challenge. We will examine the court jester system in depth: what it reveals about how power manages the threat of laughter, and what it teaches us about the difference between humor that serves the system and humor that genuinely threatens it. We will discover that the relationship between power and humor is more complicated — and more instructive — than it might first appear. And we will find, in that complexity, a framework for understanding exactly what is happening in our own moment.

Until then, continue to flourish even in these times of struggle.