The custom of placing a coin with the dead, popularly called Charon's obol, is real in the archaeological record but was never a fixed, universal rule. Excavated Greek burials show coins in the mouth, in the hand, on the chest or elsewhere in the grave, and plenty of graves have no coin at all, so the practice varied by period, region and family rather than following one set liturgy that literary sources describe as though it were uniform. The label itself, Charon's obol, is a modern archaeological convenience rather than an ancient technical term. The river he crosses is named inconsistently across sources, sometimes the Acheron and sometimes the Styx, a looseness that reflects how Greek underworld geography was never fixed into a single official map even within Athens itself.
Aristophanes' comedy Frogs puts the ferry to comic use: the god Dionysus pays Charon two obols for the crossing and is then made to row the boat himself while frogs heckle from the water, a scene that treats the grim ferryman as material for a joke rather than an object of dread, and shows how differently the same figure could be handled in cult unease and in comic theatre within the same city. Charon receives no cult of his own anywhere in the Greek world, no temple, no priesthood and no festival, which marks him as a servant of the underworld order rather than a power addressed in his own right, a status shared by other functionary figures of Greek myth such as Hermes in his psychopomp role, who actually delivers the dead to Charon's crossing rather than competing with him for the same office.