Parlare senza parole: strategie di semantizzazione sulla scena antica (e moderna)

Starting from Hipponax, the language of foreigners represented an effective tool for Greek laughter. The ‘Other’ has indeed appeared on the comic stage, both by speaking broken Greek – such as the Scythian archer in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae – and by expressing himself in his native tongue: this is the case of the Persian Pseudartabas of Acharnians, the Triballian god of Birds, and the Indian people of the so-called Charition mime. These characters overcome the communicative challenges of using a language other than Greek in front of a Greek audience through strategies similar to those that on the contemporary stage Dario Fo will employ to communicate in grammelot, the supposedly gibberish featured in his theater from the 1970s onward: the analysis of the speeches of Pseudartabas, the Triballian, and the Indians, along with the linguistic experimentalism of modern comedy, demonstrates that an effective communication does not always require words.