Archaisches Lachen

The comic is crucial to every culture: mocking established values, transcending the boundaries of morals and proprieties, dodging the laws of accepted logic. Being based mainly on performance, it takes its natural place in festival, dance and play(-acting). This nature of the comic is expressed far more directly in images than in language. Already in the Corinthian black-figure vase-painting of the 7^th century, comic images hold an important position. Detlev Wannagat analyses their typology and visual strategies, starting from the grotesquely shaped ‘padded dancers’, in which the original performative context of the festival and its alienation appears the most clearly. His close-up focus on these pictures – mostly neglected so far –, draws into clearer perspective the values which they alienate and mockingly transgress.

Detlev Wannagat, Universität Rostock.

"[Wannagat’s] approach presents them in an entirely new light. Through a combination of fine-grained attention to detail with a bold method of ‘thinking outside the box’ about motifs, behaviors, and human nature that the Greeks surely understood differently from ourselves, [Wannagat] has made a major contribution not only to the scholarship on Greek vases, but to cultural studies of the endlessly inventive world of Archaic Greece."
Alan Shapiro in: Gnomon 89 (2017) Nr. 6: 548