Laugh Tracks: Greek Comedy in Ptolemaic Egypt and Beyond

How did ancient Greek comedy survive, circulate, and shape the literary culture of Ptolemaic Egypt? Laugh Tracks sets out to chart the cultural history of the reception of Greek comedy in this specific context, following three complementary lines of inquiry.

The volume examines comic fragments preserved on Ptolemaic papyri, case studies on the potential influence of Greek comedy on literary production in Hellenistic Egypt, and fragments of Alexandrian scholarship within the long-lasting exegetical tradition of the genre. Several contributions further expand this perspective beyond Ptolemaic Egypt in chronological and geographical terms. Throughout, fragments are considered within the material, cultural and historical context of their transmitting sources, alongside the factors that governed the preservation of this textual heritage. This contextualisation sheds light on ancient ecdotic practices, exegetical methodology, scholarly attitudes towards texts, criteria for selection, and the mechanisms of reception that mediated the survival of these works.

By bringing together philologists, papyrologists and literary historians, this volume offers scholars and students of Greek comedy, Hellenistic literature and papyrology a fresh, richly contextualised account of how a major literary tradition was transmitted, read, and reinterpreted in antiquity.