The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy marks the first comprehensive introduction and reference work for the unified study of ancient comedy. From the birth of comedy in Greece to its end in Rome, from the Hellenistic diffusion of performances after the death of Menander to its sympotic, artistic, scholarly, and literary receptions in the later Roman Empire, no topic is neglected. The result offers Hellenists an excellent overview of the earliest reception and creative reuse of Greek New Comedy, and Latinists a broad perspective of the evolution of Roman comedy. In recent decades, literary approaches to drama have multiplied (new historical, intertextual, political, performative and metatheatrical, sociolinguistic, gender-driven, transgenre-driven). New information has been amassed, sometimes by reexamination of extant literary texts and material artifacts, at other times from new discoveries. Archaeologists have rethought the physical configurations of theaters; new studies of vase paintings have contributed to our knowledge of the origins of comedy and its geographical spread; new Hellenistic mosaics have provided information on Menandrian plays; epigraphists have revised victory lists and production records that provide not only the names of plays, authors, and actors, but also the dates for dramatic competitions; epigraphic documents of the Panhellenic activities of the enigmatic “Artisans of Dionysus,” who may provide the missing link between Greek and Roman comedy, have been reexamined in recent monographs; and new papyrus texts have been discovered, while old, all but forgotten texts, have been newly edited after a century or more, and modern technology has even supplied ways to recover new readings from a mutilated palimpsest of Plautus. Forty-one essays and two appendices by an international team of experts offer up-to-the-minute guides through the immense terrain of comedy, while an expert introduction surveys the major trends and shifts in scholarly study of comedy from the 1960s to today.