Jean Racine’s Les Plaideurs [The Litigants]-- from which So? Sue Me! was adapted -- was written in 1668. It stands as Racine’s lone comedy between two of his most famous tragedies: Andromaque (1667) and Britannicus (1669). At first sight, The Litigants exhibits all the features of an Italian commedia dell’arte: It takes place on a piazza, between two old curmudgeons (a judge and his faithful litigant); it has servants, which could easily pass for Harlequin and Brighella; it has children who fall in love with each other; and finally, it has all the slapstick and the lazzi one could expect from the genre.

     Yet, if the structure of the play (three acts) fits the Italian commedia, the development of the play doesn’t, not fully. The first act does not really establish a plot, but introduces, one after the other, a series of crazy characters bound to clash with each other. It introduces the audience, not to a narrative, but to an atmosphere of frenzied pursuit. It’s not so much the beginning of a play by Goldoni, as the beginning of a movie by Buster Keaton or the Marx Brothers. Although the play ends with a wedding, in the Italian tradition, we have to wait until the middle of the second act for the lovers to appear in the same scene, one scene in which they are never alone – and, with the exception of a few lines at the end of the play, their only scene together.

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     The explanation for this odd foray in the commedia genre may be that Racine was not so much paying respect to the popular comedy of his time, as to the ancient genre of the Greek comedy. The Litigants, and by adaptation So? Sue Me!, pay respect to the genesis of European comedy. It is a not so subtle variation on Aristophanes comedy, The Wasps, which dates from 422 BC. The Wasps makes fun of Cleon, a demagogue who ruled Athens at the time, and presents him as a traitor manipulating a corrupt legal system for his own personal gain.

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     “Constitutionally, supreme power lay with the People as voters in the assembly and as jurors in the courts, but they could be manipulated by demagogues skilled in oratory and supported by networks of satellites and informers. Cleon had succeeded Pericles as the dominant speaker in the assembly, and increasingly he could manipulate the courts for political and personal ends, especially in the prosecution of public officials for mismanagement of their duties.”

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     Oy! 422 BC, what did you expect? It's not like it could happen today.

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[Wikipedia, relying on Aristophanes: The Frogs and Other Plays, D.Barrett, Penguin Classics 1964, p. 35; and Aristophanes: Wasps D. MacDowell (ed), Oxford University Press 1971, pp. 1–2.]