Socrates is so smart he's not?

Aristophanes shows Socrates to be a man whose cleverness has led him into a lifestyle so detached from the ethical reality of Greece that the man cannot support himself financially through completely honest means. Before Strepsiades even meets Socrates, a student informs him that they are so poor that Socrates “made away with the cloak from the wrestling school” in order to feed the students (177-179). This revelation also contains another facet of Socrates: he is unwilling to deal with physical realities and necessities until their effects, manifested by starving and complaining students,interrupt his thoughts. Socrates perceives himself as a good and quite wise person, asking the old man to “describe [his] own way to me / so that when I know what sort it is / I may next bring novel devices to bear on you” (478-480), and seemingly willing to go to great lengths for his students and himself; however, reality shows that he is so easily flustered by the father with sub-par reasoning skills that the teacher kicks Strepsiades out of the thinkery. A more common man would bar Pheidippides from learning the art of speech; the great thinker, however, schemes and plans to teach the old fool a lesson through his kid, without obvious care to the risks involved. Socrates' life is a great waste of time; his cleverness results in few productive results, as his mode of thinking is useful for occupying time and for personal gain, neither of which really help society as a whole (in this sense, “usefulness” is defined in respect to society). There is one positive aspect of his thinkery: Socrates teaches the students to consistently question longstanding notions, such as the existence of Zeus (though not supernatural beings in general) and the validity of a system predicated on the notion of age directly correlating with wisdom (as Strepsiades' character negates). Aristophanes presents Socrates as a way to balance the crude ribaldry of Strepsiades with a more subtle humour that makes the play more enjoyable to the middle and upper classes that were likely to see the play. In addition, the failure of Socrates to rise above trickery helps the character stand as the model of how pure intellect does not prevent fallacy—perhaps a point he later wished to make with the judges of the theatrical competition, who would be considered “great” people in their own right.

Side note: when reading this play, I felt the same mix of appalled embarrassment and base laughs from the humor in this play as from Gottfried's rendition of “The Aristocrats.”