SOURCE: "The Premises of Comedy: Functions of Dramatic Space in an Ancient and Modern Art Form," in Journal of Popular Film and Television, Vol. 15, No. 4, Winter, 1988, pp. 180-90.

In the following essay, Konstan focuses on such workplace situation comedies as Barney Miller and Archie Bunker's Place in a discussion of the function of place in classical Greek New Comedy and the television comedy series.

In this paper, I shall examine the function of place, in the sense of the scene or site of dramatic action, in two comic traditions, one ancient, the other recent and still lively.¹ These traditions are the so-called New Comedy of the classical Greek dramatists and their Roman imitators or adapters and the contemporary situation comedies of television. Comparison of sitcoms with the classical form will help reveal the ways in which the settings of comedy, both ancient and modern, are specific to their...