La commedia delle lingue dall’opera buffa al cinema comico

The librettoes by Gaetano Gasbarri will be analysed. He was a little known Neapolitan librettist of the XIX century and author of comic operas, including Rossini’s L’equivoco stravagante. The identified recurring linguistic features are puns, double entendres, aposiopesis, code-mixing, irony on special languages. As comedy derives from the imitation of spoken language, numerous borrowings from Goldoni have been detected. This comic quality is eminently of metalinguistic nature, because it makes fun of forms typical of other genres: serious opera, treatise writing, legal language, poetry. Many stylistic features of comic opera derive from “Commedia dell’Arte” and have been adopted in blockbuster comedies: their presence is illustrated in Totò’s films.