Updated September 24, 2025 at 10:24 AM PDT
President Trump's celebration of Jimmy Kimmel's (now brief) and Stephen Colbert's (still happening) removal from the air — along with his calls for canceling other late-night comedians — may feel very 2025. But for classics scholars, it feels a lot like the ancient world.
In fifth century B.C. Athens, it was a point of civic pride that comedians could say pretty much anything they wanted to the people in power.
"They could crack merciless jokes about politicians as those politicians sat in the audience," said Mike Fontaine, a professor of classics at Cornell University and the author of a book about ancient jokes. "And nothing happened to those comedians."
But, of course, there were limits. Starting in the fourth century B.C., when the ancient Greek world became more autocratic, comedians who said things that displeased their rulers could land themselves in a lot of trouble.
"The patterns are identical, which makes all this totally predictable," said Fontaine. "The reason we have to focus on ancient Greece and Rome is because those are examples of democracies that slid into authoritarian states."
Two Greeks and a Roman walk into a bar …
Fontaine said the Greek philosopher Plutarch shared stories about the fates of comics who dared to make fun of their leaders in a treatise titled The Education of Children from around 100 A.D.
One of these cautionary tales concerns the Ancient Greek satirist Sotades, who lived in Alexandria in the third century B.C. When the ruler at the time, Ptolemy, married his sister, Arsinoe, Sotades wrote a poem telling the king, "εἰς οὐχ ὁσίην τρυμαλιὴν τὸ κέντρον ὠθεῖς." Rough translation: "You're pushing your scepter into an ungodly hole."
"Ptolemy didn't think it was funny. So he had him hauled away and put in prison," Fontaine said, adding that Sotades escaped, but was eventually caught. "And he was closed up in a lead coffin and thrown into the sea, where he drowned."
Plutarch's same treatise also gets into the tale of Theocritus of Chios. The fourth century B.C. poet and politician was known for his witty criticisms of powerful figures. But Fontaine says things took a serious turn when Theocritus got a gig working for a king named Antigonus the One-Eyed.
"He rather stupidly made a couple of jokes about Antigonus missing one eye," Fontaine said.
The punchline to one of these jokes refers to the king as a cyclops — the cannibalistic, one-eyed monster of Greek mythology. For this, Fontaine said the king promptly had Theocritus executed.
It wasn't just ancient Greek comedians who met similarly grisly fates for making politically incendiary quips.
Fontaine said Plutarch also shares a similar story about the Roman statesman and caustically funny orator Marcus Tullius Cicero. In the biography Life of Cicero, Plutarch describes Cicero's death at the hands of followers of Rome's strongman leader Marc Antony.
"Cicero delivered a famous series of speeches called The Philippics, where he roasted Mark Antony over and over. He derided him in all kinds of terms; some funny, some not so funny," Fontaine said. "Mark Antony didn't think it was funny at all."
Comedians under fire — then and now
President Trump similarly didn't find Kimmel's recent remarks on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that took aim at supporters of the slain right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk entertaining — though Kimmel hasn't been thrown behind bars (or worse) as a result, and this wasn't a direct jibe at Trump, though Kimmel has made many of those over the years.
Instead, two days after the controversial monologue, ABC pulled Kimmel's late-night show indefinitely, bowing to threats from the FCC chairman against stations carrying the program. Though Kimmel has since returned to the airwaves, two major broadcast groups — Sinclair and Nexstar — continue to refuse to air his show in their broadcast areas.
But scholars see a direct link between the fates of ancient comedians living through collapsing democracies and the crackdown on their descendants today, noting the importance of ancient Greek and Roman writings to the founders of this country.
"The founders absolutely read Plutarch," said Stanford University history department chair Caroline Winterer, who studies the influence of the ancient world on early American history. "And they often alluded to people who dared in these early democracies, these nascent republics, to look tyranny in the face and say that tyrants were a threat to the very survival of democracies and republics, which ultimately rest not on the will of one, but on the good of the many."
Winterer said like the ancients, the creators of the U.S. Constitution possessed the general belief that those in power should have thick skins.
"Because along with the adulation of the masses comes the discontent of the masses with one of the sublimest weapons that we have in our arsenal of free speech," Winterer said. "And that is wit and humor."
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