The Dervish's Aristophanic Mode

More than any other art, comedy is tied to the realities of its own time and place. Although that fact makes it fascinating from a historical point of view, its sole purpose, in portraying ephemeral events and personalities, is to represent certain aspects of their eternal humanity which are overlooked by loftier types of poetry like epic and tragedy...

The fundamental facts are always the same--the polar oppositions between the individual and the community, the mob and the intellectual, the poor and the rich, liberty and oppression, tradition and progress. But there is another factor. Despite its passionate interest in politics, Aristophanic comedy contemplates its subject from such a height and with such intellectual liberty that it abolishes the irrelevant ephemeral aspects of even the most trivial fact. What the poet describes is eternal, because it is in Nietzsche's phrase the All-too-human Humanity; and he could not describe it unless he could stand at some distance from it. Again and again his picture of temporary reality dissolves into the timeless higher reality of imaginative or allegorical truth. The most impressive example of this is The Birds, where the poet gaily shakes off the pressing anxieties of the present, and makes a wish-picture of an ideal state, Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, where all the burdens of earth vanish and everything is winged and free, where only human follies and weaknesses may remain and flourish harmlessly, so that the finest of all delights may not be lacking, the delight whose absence would spoil even this paradise--immortal laughter.

--Werner Jaeger, Paideia, tr. Gilbert Highet, vol. 1, 359, 369-70.