This chapter is devoted to the visual mockery of most aspects of everyday life and mythology.According to Diogenes Laertius (1.33), Thales often used to say that he thanked the gods for makinghim a human not a beast, a man not a woman, and finally a Greek and not a foreigner. I have orderedthe chapter accordingly, gradually, starting from the comical use of inanimate objects, animals insituation comedy, social stereotypes and comic archetypes about women, and then moving onto men,finally concluding with debased heroes and gods.

THE COMICALINANIMATE:VISUAL PUNS AND MISUSEDOBJECTS

Eye-cups

Visual humour begins with corrupted eye-cups, a very common series in the sixth century BC. Tounderstand the comic mechanisms of this very ‘inanimate’ type of visual humour, apresentation of the eye-cup series, and a critique of its usual interpretations, apotropaism, andanthropomorphism is in order.

Eye-cups, Augenschale (Steinhart 1995), coupe àà yeux, asa term of classifi cation, is misleading and probably inadequate; a good number of vases of manydifferent shapes, techniques, provenance, and date were decorated with eyes since the seventhcentury BC. For example, a ‘Melian’ (from Paros) amphora in Athens, produced in the 640s (Papastamos1970:93), has two eyes under the handles. The latter magnify the eyebrows to create an impression ofdepth. On a Boeotian krater in Munich, two eyes with arrows as brows are painted under the handles.A Naxian amphora (from Delos) in Mykonos has a large eye under a handle; an Ionian multiple eye bowl(from Naucratis) in London shows two pairs of eyes; and a Rhodian oinochoe in Munich 5 has two eyespainted on either side of the spout. Except for the eyes, they do not have much in common with theAthenian eye-cups, but they demonstrate that eyes on vases have a long tradition.