Ancient comedy is both one of the most illuminating and one of the most dangerous sources for ancient social history. The jokes reveal anxieties and social assumptions; but comedy exaggerates and inverts, making it hard to calibrate what's satirical distortion and what's genuine observation.

Aristophanic comedy — the eleven surviving plays from the late 5th century BC — is explicitly political: Cleon, Socrates, Euripides, and other real contemporaries are named and satirized. The plays deal with the Peloponnesian War, the demagogues, the sophists, and the economic pressures of wartime. They're an invaluable supplement to Thucydides because they show the popular mood rather than the elite perspective.

Menandrian comedy (New Comedy, late 4th century BC) abandoned the political for the domestic: love affairs, recognition plots, comic slaves, miserly fathers. It's the ancestor of Roman comedy (Plautus and Terence) and through them of much subsequent European comedy. It's also our main literary evidence for Hellenistic Athenian middle-class life.

Roman comedy's treatment of slaves is particularly interesting for social history. The clever slave who outsmarts his master is the central figure in Plautine comedy — and real Roman slaves could and did exercise considerable autonomy, though the comedy inverts rather than represents the normal relationship. What the jokes reveal about Roman anxiety concerning slave intelligence and cunning is at least as important as what they directly represent.