Plautus causes the pariahs of the world, the slaves and prostitutes, to come up victorious from the confrontation with the powerful: the procurer, the soldier, the father or the banker. And he does it with a comical, universal and ancient approach, turning the world turned upside down with utopic elements and improbability. Plautus sets his little deceptions in a never-never land, in a nonexistent Greece inhabited by fixed theatre roles. A troupe that entertains, cheers up the hearts and, if you want, invites you to think: human faults, seen from a humorous distance, can inspire many sitcoms. We would not exaggerate if we were to say that theatre was the television of that time, football is today’s epic and pop music is present lyric.

“But who is Plautus?” the reader would ask. On this point, there can be two answers: the factual one—a Roman playwright of the second century before Christ, imitator of Greek comedies; or the one from the media’s perspective—the first and the best sitcom scriptwriter of all times, a kind of a Marta Kauffman of Antiquity. The best justification for this statement can be found in Plautus’s working method, a method that present scriptwriters in the West use constantly. These scriptwriters are almost always unaware of the origin of this method and the irresistible automatism that it has developed.

This working method is a perfect synthesis of geniality: on the one hand, there is an imitation of Greek theatre comic schemes: intellectual, well construed, proved in scene and successful for a cultured and heterogeneous public. We should not forget that the Hellenistic world of the IV and III centuries before Christ, where New Comedy was born, was a world that could be called “globalised”: a crucible of cultures, of languages, of commercial and managerial effervescence. On the other hand, we can see an assimilation of farce techniques, indigenous of Plautus’s own Latin culture: improvisation, intense obscenity, insults and rude remarks. In other words, these are oral plays without a defined structure and led by emblematic characters: the Glutton, the Bigmouth, the Avaricious, the Stupid. The city of Rome had just appeared in the Mediterranean and lived engrossed by internal wars and unaware of the cultural trends coming from the Hellenistic world.

In that small and limited world of the Roman theatre show, Plautus, always aware of the demands of his public, knew how to combine the best of both traditions and handed down to his followers the key to success. This fortunate formula is based on a closed collection of characters, representative of the actual society, with good and bad people, a vivacious language, with self-referent jokes (that is to say, allusive to the plot, to the situation or to the defects and faults of the characters), and trivial comical situations. The solving of the plot should occur in the play or chapter (self-conclusive), and all these chapters should also be happy—that is, unimportant. At the end, the characters should be as near as possible to their original situations, no matter how senseless the plot has been. This is the case because the characters are far from developing psychologically. The internal coherence of the play is subjected to the autonomous comical strength of each scene or sketch. This feature has led brainy philologists to consider the Plautine comedies as literary works of secondary importance.

Latin comedies based upon successful Greek comedies were called palliatae (the pallium or tunic was the dress that identified a Greek man), and this was the genre cultivated by Plautus, as he felt the creative strength of the Greek literary element. The comedies of clearly Roman theme, that is, with Roman characters, stage design and Roman defects and customs, were called togatae (the toga was the Roman national dress). This difference has gone through centuries and geography, and nowadays it is the customary method to compose successful comedies in the Occidental world; curiously, the United States of America has become a source of inspiration for European television, as Greece was for Rome in the second century before Christ. Therefore, the North American sitcom with its intellectual aspirations (Friends is a good example), has come across the ocean and, imitated, has become the Spanish sitcom Siete vidas, a modern palliata. Thus, the rich and spoiled girl (Rachel), the obsessive-compulsive (Monica), the marginal woman (Phoebe), the skirt chaser (Joey), the sarcastic (Chandler) and the clever (Ross) have been transformed in the characters that define the more characteristic faults of each culture and country. In the same way, the comedy without pretensions, which clearly shows the social vices of that place and works as a social satire, such as Married with Children, has become the inspiration of sitcoms as, for instance, Escenas de matrimonio, the modern togata. More racial, less intellectual, the togata reaches other kind of sensibilities.

This new manifestation in TV is, of course, a more complex phenomenon; but tradition is exactly that, a never-ending trip of coming and going. Although with caution, there could be recognized a universal employment of comical characters and situations. If Plautus could be raised from the dead, he would laugh as he recognized his jokes in popular TV series, so different from the annotated editions of his comedies.