When Pigs Fly In The Devil Is An Ass

The phrase "when pigs fly" has been rolling off English tongues for centuries. Ben Jonson's The Devil is an Ass* has been sitting on library shelves since 1616. Most people never put them in the same sentence. But they should.

Both are about impossibility. Also, both are about human folly. And both are funnier than they have any right to be.

What Is The Devil is an Ass*

Ben Jonson wrote The Devil is an Ass* in 1616. It premiered at the Blackfriars Theatre by the King's Men — Shakespeare's old company. The play is a Jacobean city comedy, which means it's set in contemporary London, populated by merchants, gulls, conmen, and social climbers, and written with a satirical bite that feels surprisingly modern.

The plot: a junior devil named Pug petitions Satan for a holiday on Earth. Which means satan laughs, warns him that Londoners are already beyond demonic improvement, and lets him go. Now, he wants to corrupt souls. Pug possesses a man named Wittipol, then gets tangled in a web of schemes involving a foolish knight (Sir Paul Eitherside), a greedy merchant (Merecraft), a projecting "projector" (Engine), and a cast of characters all trying to out-hustle each other.

Pug fails. Spectacularly. He's arrested, beaten, thrown in a pigsty, and eventually dragged back to Hell — where Satan welcomes him with a "told you so.

The title comes from a line in the play. That said, the joke: the devil is an ass. Literally, in Pug's case. Also, a character named Fitzdottrel owns a "familiar" — a spirit he thinks is a devil but is really just a conman in disguise. Actually, it comes from the subplot. Figuratively, in everyone else's.

The "When Pigs Fly" Connection

Here's where it gets interesting. The phrase "when pigs fly" — or its older cousin "pigs might fly" — doesn't appear in Jonson's text. On the flip side, not in those words. But the idea* is everywhere.

Pug ends up in a pigsty. In real terms, the play is obsessed with transformation, disguise, and things that shouldn't happen happening anyway. He's mistaken for a pig. Impossible. Here's the thing — an honest lawyer? Still, he's treated like livestock. Also, a devil walking Cheapside? A projector turning lead into gold? Here's the thing — impossible. Jonson would say: when pigs fly.

The idiom "when pigs fly" (or "pigs may fly") appears in print by the 1600s. John Withals's 1616 dictionary for schoolboys includes "Pigs fly in the ayre with their tayles forward" as a proverb for impossibility. Jonson knew his proverbs. But he stuffed his plays with them. So while he didn't write the exact line, he wrote the world that made the line make sense.

Why It Matters / Why People Care

You might ask: why does a 400-year-old comedy about a devil in a pigsty matter?

Because it's the first great "fish out of water" satire about corporate culture.

Replace "projectors" with "startup founders." Replace "alchemical gold schemes" with "crypto whitepapers.Here's the thing — " Replace "Sir Paul Eitherside" with a LinkedIn thought-leader posting about hustle culture. The play reads like it was written last Tuesday.

Jonson understood something eternal: people selling impossible things always find buyers. Plus, we tempt ourselves. He discovers the market is saturated. But pug arrives expecting to do the corrupting. So naturally, the devil doesn't need to tempt us. Humans are already running the most efficient hell on earth — no demonic assistance required.

That insight hasn't aged. It's sharpened.

The Pigsty as Metaphor

The pigsty scene (Act 4, Scene 3) is the play's beating heart. In real terms, pug, disguised as a servant, gets thrown into an actual sty with actual pigs. He's covered in filth. Worth adding: he's mistaken for a swine. The devil — a fallen angel, a prince of darkness — is indistinguishable from livestock.

It's a visual gag. Here's the thing — it's also a theological statement. Day to day, pride turned Lucifer into the Devil. Practically speaking, pride turns Pug into a pig. The lowest animal becomes the mirror for the highest fallen being.

And it's where "when pigs fly" stops being a joke about impossibility and starts being a joke about identity*. So pug is a pig in that moment. Still, not flying. Practically speaking, wallowing. The impossibility isn't flight — it's dignity.

How It Works: The Play's Machinery

Jonson builds comedy like a watchmaker. On top of that, every gear meshes. Let's break the mechanism.

The Frame: Hell's Bureaucracy

The play opens in Hell. Satan hears petitions. Not a fiery pit — an office. Now, there's hierarchy, procedure, complaint forms. Even so, devils file reports. Jonson satirizes the Jacobean state by making Hell run like the Court of Wards or the Exchequer.

Pug's request for "leave" is treated like a civil service vacation request. Satan denies it, then approves it, then attaches conditions. The bureaucracy of evil is funnier than the evil itself.

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This frame matters. It tells us: corruption isn't supernatural. It's administrative. Here's the thing — it's paperwork. It's middle management.

The City: London as a Machine for Fools

Once Pug reaches London, the play shifts to a multi-plot structure. Three main strands:

1. Wittipol and Manly — two gentlemen, one clever, one honest, both watching the chaos
2. The Projectors — Merecraft, Engine, and their circle selling impossible schemes
3. Fitzdottrel and Pug — the fool and his "familiar," each using the other

The projectors are the engine. They propose: a company to insure ships that don't exist. Practically speaking, a method to make silk from goat hair. They recruit investors with prospectuses. Which means " They speak in buzzwords. In real terms, a way to turn lead into gold using "philosophical mercury. They use legal jargon to obscure the fact that nothing exists.

Sound familiar? Jonson invented the "tech bro" archetype four centuries early.

The Devil's Education

Pug thinks he's the predator. He's the prey.

Every scheme he touches collapses. Now, every person he tries to corrupt is already corrupt — or too stupid to corrupt properly. And he gets beaten by a constable. He gets cheated by a prostitute. He gets thrown in the pigsty by a mob.

His education is the play's arc. He learns that evil

His education is the play’s arc. He learns that evil is a self‑consuming loop: every scheme he plants backfires, every ally he secures turns into a rival, and every triumph he claims is immediately undercut by a harsher reality. Consider this: when the mob drags him into the sty, the very animal he pretended to be becomes his judge. The pig‑pen is not merely a gag; it is a crucible in which Pug’s inflated self‑image is melted down to its basest components. In that filthy pen, the audience sees the ultimate inversion of the devil’s promise: instead of power, there is only exposure; instead of dominion, there is humiliation. The spectacle forces the spectators to confront the paradox that the most terrifying figure in Christian myth can be reduced to a creature of mud and grunts, while the most mundane of men can masquerade as a sovereign of deceit.

The play’s machinery also hinges on the contrast between language and action. The projectors speak in a lexicon of abstract nouns—“project,” “venture,” “speculation”—yet their deeds are grounded in the concrete: ledgers, contracts, and the physical construction of a fake factory. Here's the thing — their discourse is a linguistic labyrinth designed to obscure material emptiness. That said, meanwhile, Pug’s own speeches are a collage of borrowed maxims, each one stripped of its original gravity and repurposed to serve his own shallow ambition. On top of that, when he declares, “I shall be the master of all that is unseen,” the audience recognizes the hollow echo of a sermon that once warned against the very greed he now espouses. The dissonance between lofty rhetoric and squalid reality becomes the engine of the comedy, exposing how empty words can masquerade as substance.

Jonson’s satire does not stop at the surface of folly; it extends into the architecture of social aspiration. The three interlocking plots—Wittipol’s cautious wisdom, Manly’s blunt honesty, and the projectors’ feverish scheming—mirror the stratified layers of Jacobean society. Each stratum is populated by characters who believe they can transcend their station through cleverness or charisma, only to discover that the system they seek to manipulate is indifferent to individual brilliance. The play’s climax, in which the various deceptions converge upon a single, chaotic marketplace, illustrates how the pursuit of personal advancement inevitably collides with the collective inertia of a society that rewards appearance over substance. In that convergence, the audience perceives a broader commentary: the very mechanisms that promise upward mobility are themselves built upon a foundation of shared delusion.

The final curtain falls not on a triumphant resolution but on a resigned acknowledgment of the futility of the characters’ machinations. Pug, now drenched in filth, watches the world continue its indifferent spin, while the projectors retreat to draft yet another prospectus, their eyes already scanning for fresh victims. The play’s ending is deliberately ambiguous, leaving the audience to wonder whether the cycle of deception will ever be broken or whether it will simply repeat in new guises. In this lingering uncertainty, Jonson offers a stark, almost fatalistic vision: the world is a stage where every participant is both performer and puppet, and the only constant is the endless rehearsal of folly.

In sum, the comedy operates as a tightly calibrated clockwork of satire, where theological irony, bureaucratic parody, linguistic trickery, and social critique interlock to expose the absurdity of ambition in a world that prizes illusion over truth. On the flip side, by turning the fallen angel into a pig and the would‑be schemer into a wallowing swine, Jonson forces the audience to confront the uncomfortable truth that pride, when stripped of its lofty veneer, reveals a universal vulnerability. The play thus ends not with a moralizing sermon but with a stark, unflinching reminder that the greatest illusion is the belief that one can ever truly escape the mud from which one began.