Denotation in absentia in Literary Language: The Case of Aristophanic Comedy

Summary

‘Defective Communication’ in the Strategies of Comedy

While studying the degrees and modalities of comedy in Aristophanes over the last few years, I have often come across a mechanism which seems to me to be common to the comedy of every age and which, for lack of a generally accepted definition, I shall call ‘defective communication’. By this I mean that body of allusions, metaphors, puns, which can only work if they refer to an implicit network of information from which the listener or spectator is able to freely extract the necessary data to trigger the comic level of the message.

This particular aspect of ancient comedy has attracted scarce attention over the last fifty years, perhaps due to the strong influence of Bakhtin's remarks about carnivalesque in the field of study on the ancient theatre. It is quite easy to understand why scholars are especially impressed by those manifestations of comic which seem to be more remote or belonging to “another’ culture: elements from the Dionysian cult, “gastronomic“ topics, obscenities, aischrologia, iambic invective. At the same time I believe that it could be just as enlightening to observe, in cultural contexts so different to ours, the utilization of strategies that still work and whose persistence could count for something in defining the very concept of “comedy”.