Reconstructing Aristotle’s Lost “On Comedy”: A Structural and Cognitive Model of the Comic

Aristotle’s On Comedy is lost, yet scattered remarks in the Poetics, Rhetoric, and later Peripatetic sources suggest a coherent theory of the comic. This paper reconstructs that theory by triangulating classical texts with structuralist poetics and cognitive incongruity theory. I argue that comedy operates through reversible misalignment among agent goals, social norms, and recognition, resolved by status-negating correction rather than tragic purification. Using graph-transform models, I formalize core comic mechanisms—such as inversion, displacement, and iterated misunderstanding—showing how they preserve structural consistency while shifting interpretive frames. This model accounts for both cross-cultural universals and genre mutations, from Aristophanic satire to modern romantic comedy, and reframes laughter as a culturally mediated signal of restored play-state equilibrium.