Egypt’s “first Broadway-style” musical comedy, Praksa (by Nader Salah el-Din & Hisham Gabr), which debuted at the Cairo Opera House in 2009, holds not only a significant place in Arabic theater history, but offers substantial material for consideration of socio-political questions of gender (in)equality, popular civic rights, and the “revolving door” of autocratic control in Egypt. Through comparative examination of a pivotal musical number from this seminal production and its two literary ancestors, Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Praksa, Mushkilat al-Hukm (1960) and Aristophanes’ Ekklesiazousai “Women in Congress Assembled” (c. 392/391 BCE), the current paper will explore the boundaries and potency of socio-political satire in the ever-(yet somehow never-)changing dynamic of Egyptian authoritarianism. Frustrated with the feckless leadership of Farouk and oligarchic élites in 1939, Tawfiq al-Hakim surprisingly took dramatic inspiration for his satirical spin on bad governance from an unheralded, ancient musical comedy by an Old Comedian of ancient Greece. Aristophanes had offered a gritty satire of topsy-turvy inversion in which women, led by Praxagora, assumed men’s clothing, beards, and democratic authority to establish a proto-communistic program of wealth re-distribution whereby women would run state and home alike to keep their now emasculated men from further damaging Athens. The “do-nothing” men, represented by Praxagora’s stupid, old husband, however, are still seen in the end to be self-seeking drains on common resources. Al-Hakim follows Aristophanes fairly closely (as a handout with a complete, tripartite, structural analysis of the three dramas will show) through the three acts written in 1939, though he invents a philosopher/intellectual and a general to form, along with the women’s leader Praksa, a troika—naturally run by the military man in “Egyptian” Athens! Al-Hakim left composition of biting charges against corrupt monarchy until a final three acts and publication in the Nasser years. Like Aristophanes, he captures the dilemma of rulers’ corruptibility, no matter how noble their initial goals, by satirizing the triumvirate’s desire to install Praksa’s dim-witted husband as their puppet king, a front-man for their usurpation of the democratic revolution they inspired. Based on direct consultation and collaboration with the writing team of Praksa, the musical, the authors of the present paper will show and analyze the comic, musical trio in which Nader Salah el-Din’s Egyptian Arabic lyrics masterfully capture this moment: a coup by one-time democratic activists propping up a cuckolded, idiot king, their “windup-toy,” “ping-pong ball,” “robot,” beast of burden, a royal ass.