The parts of a comedy are the same with [those of] a tragedy, and the end is partly the same; for they both delight and teach:  the comics are called didaskaloi[1] of the Greeks, no less than the tragics.  Nor is the moving of laughter always the end of comedy; that is rather a fowling for the people’s delight, or their fooling.  For, as Aristotle says rightly, the moving of laughter is a fault in comedy, a kind of turpitude that depraves some part of a man’s nature without a disease.  As a wry face moves laughter, or a deformed vizard, or a rude clown dressed in a lady’s habit and using her actions; we dislike and scorn such representations, which made the ancient philosophers ever think laughter unfitting in a wise man.  So that what either in the words or sense of an author, or in the language and actions of men, is awry or depraved, does strongly stir mean affections, and provoke for the most part to laughter.  And therefore it was clear that all insolent and obscene speeches, jests upon the best men, injuries to particular persons, perverse and sinister sayings (and the rather, unexpected) in the old comedy did move laughter, especially where it did imitate any dishonesty, and scurrility came forth in the place of wit; which, who understands the nature and genius of laughter cannot but perfectly know.

[Footnote 1:  Teachers.]

He then goes on to say of Aristophanes that

he expressed all the moods and figures of what was ridiculous, oddly.  In short, as vinegar is not accounted good till the wine be corrupted, so jests that are true and natural seldom raise laughter with that beast the multitude.  They love nothing that is right and proper.  The farther it runs from reason or possibility, with them the better it is.

In the latter part of this it is evident that Ben is speaking with a little bitterness.  His own comedies are too rigidly constructed according to Aristotle’s dictum, that the moving of laughter was a fault in comedy.  I like the passage as an illustration of a fact undeniably true, that Shakespeare’s humor was altogether a new thing upon the stage, and also as showing that satirists (for such were also the writers of comedy) were looked upon rather as censors and moralists than as movers of laughter.  Dante, accordingly, himself in this sense the greatest of satirists, in putting Horace among the five great poets in limbo, qualifies him with the title of satiro.

But if we exclude the satirists, what are we to do with Aristophanes?  Was he not a satirist, and in some sort also a censor?  Yes; but, as it appears to me, of a different kind, as well as in a different degree, from any other ancient.  I think it is plain that he wrote his comedies not only to produce certain political, moral, and even literary ends, but for the fun of the thing.  I am so poor a Grecian that I have no doubt I miss three quarters of what is most characteristic of him.  But even through