Abstract

While the following chapter will examine, in part, the Platonic Socrates, this chapter focuses on the depictions of Socratic humor we find in Aristophanes, the fragments of Old Comedy, Xenophon, and the fragments of the minor Socratics. It suggests that these depictions of Socratic humor are part of a broader debate concerning Socrates’s use of irony, mockery, and other gelastic practices. By sketching the contours of this debate, it illustrates how the earliest conversations surrounding the ethics and politics of humor within the western philosophical tradition were shaped by the figure of Socrates.