At the annual Athenian  drama festival in 426 BC, a comic play called The Babylonians, written by a young poet  named Aristophanes, was awarded first prize. But the play’s depiction of Athens’  conduct during the Peloponnesian War was so controversial that afterwards, a politician named Kleon  took Aristophanes to court for "slandering the people of Athens  in the presence of foreigners." Aristophanes struck back two years later with a play called The Knights. In it, he openly mocked Kleon, ending with Kleon’s character working as  a lowly sausage seller outside the city gates. This style of satire was a consequence of the unrestricted democracy  of 5th century Athens and is now called "Old Comedy." Aristophanes’ plays, the world’s earliest  surviving comic dramas, are stuffed full of parodies, songs,  sexual jokes, and surreal fantasy. They often use wild situations, like a hero flying to heaven  on a dung beetle, or a net cast over a house to keep  the owner’s father trapped inside, in order to subvert audience expectations. And they’ve shaped how comedy’s been written and performed ever since. The word "comedy" comes from  the Ancient Greek "komos," – revel, and "oide," – singing, and it differed from its companion  art form, "tragedy" in many ways. Where ancient Athenian tragedies dealt  with the downfall of the high and mighty, their comedies usually ended happily. And where tragedy almost always  borrowed stories from legend, comedy addressed current events. Aristophanes’ comedies celebrated ordinary people and attacked the powerful. His targets were arrogant politicians, war-mongering generals, and self-important intellectuals, exactly the people who sat in  the front row of the theatre, where everyone could see their reactions. As a result, they were referred to  as komoidoumenoi: "those made fun of in comedy." Aristophanes’ vicious  and often obscene mockery held these leaders to account, testing their commitment to the city. One issue, in particular,  inspired much of Aristophanes’ work: the Peloponnesian War  between Athens and Sparta. In Peace, written in 421 BC, a middle-aged Athenian frees  the embodiment of peace from a cave, where she’d been exiled  by profiteering politicians. Then, in the aftermath of a crushing  naval defeat for Athens in 411 BC, Aristophanes wrote "Lysistrata." In this play, the women  of Athens grow sick of war and go on a sex strike  until their husbands make peace. Other plays use similarly fantastic  scenarios to skewer topical situations, such as in "Clouds," where Aristophanes mocked  fashionable philosophical thinking. The hero Strepsiades enrolls in Socrates’s new philosophical school, where he learns  how to prove that wrong is right and that a debt is not a debt. No matter how outlandish these plays get, the heroes always prevail in the end. Aristophanes also became the master of the parabasis, a comic technique where actors  address the audience directly, often praising the playwright  or making topical comments and jokes. For example, in "Birds," the Chorus takes  the role of different birds and threatens the Athenian judges that if their play doesn’t win first prize, they’ll defecate on them  as they walk around the city. Perhaps the judges  didn’t appreciate the joke, as the play came in second. By exploring new ideas and encouraging self-criticism  in Athenian society, Aristophanes not only  mocked his fellow citizens, but he shaped the nature of comedy itself. Hailed by some scholars  as the father of comedy, his fingerprints are visible  upon comic techniques everywhere, from slapstick to double acts to impersonations to political satire. Through the praise of free speech  and the celebration of ordinary heroes, his plays made his audience think  while they laughed. And his retort to Kleon in 425 BC  still resonates today: “I’m a comedian,  so I’ll speak about justice, no matter how hard  it sounds to your ears.”