Explores the significance of Plato’s ideas about play in terms of the so-called tragic paradox, which asks, roughly: why do we enjoy watching suffering on the tragic stage, but become upset when we see actual suffering in everyday life? Plato has trouble with this problem in the Republic, in which he attempts to distinguish actual grief from the grief felt in the theater, but he approaches the problem from a new angle later in the Philebus. Here he distinguishes the negative feelings we feel when we wish someone ill in real life—the emotion is phthonos, often translated as "malice" or "envy"—and the form this emotion takes when we watch a comedy. Although phthonos seems to be present when we watch a comedy—we want the character to slip on the banana peel, we want the character to fall down the stairs—it is somehow mixed with enjoyment, and he calls this mixture “playful phthonos” (paidikos phthonos). In the theater, the reason why the spectators enjoy the spectacle of suffering is not that there is something inherently pleasurable in seeing someone suffer but because the spectators are sitting there “playing” along with the actors, and this play is pleasurable.