Giving examples describe the way in which Aristophanes tried to make his audience laugh; what, also, can you infer from The Wasps about the types of people who make up that audience?

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Giving examples describe the way in which Aristophanes tried to make his audience laugh; what, also, can you infer from The Wasps about the types of people who make up that audience?

Aristophanes used lots of different techniques to make his audience laugh and to get them to enjoy the performances. These techniques ranged from low 'slapstick' humour  and crude jokes such as Philocleon going to the toilet in the home made court room in front of 'the jury'  to more educated jokes being mainly aimed towards Kleon, the archon of the time and also the jokes were made for the more educated Athenian.

For the more simple minded Athenian, slapstick humour and role reversal was used to please the audience, this was done by having the character Philocleon being a bit dim minded and crazy. We see this in the first act and first scene where Philocleon escapes through the chimney and talks to Bdelycleon saying that he is a 'puff of smoke' trying to get out of the chimney. In a modern day audience, this wouldn't have been found that amusing, but during the rein of Aristophanes plays, this was funny and got laughs from a wide range of the audience, not just the simple minded Athenians. Also when Bdelycleon stuffs his dad back down the chimney, he cracks a joke about  being the 'son of smoke'; that small play on words is still used today and would have gotten laughs from the audience.

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Also in the first scene, we have a small use of role reversal with Sosias impersonating Alcibiades and joking around about his lisp when talking to Xanthias. Yet again this is humour is aimed for the whole audience but mainly again the lower educated, more listening based audience members over the people watching the play. We can infer from this that the audience had uneducated/less educated Athenians but we can also tell that the audience was varied due to it being a religious festival, everyone had to attend and watch these plays.

Along with this, Aristophanes wanted to attack Kleon ...

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