Pantomime

In the modern sense a pantomime is an entertainment in which current events or fashionable foibles are introduced by way of burlesque. Formerly it denoted a performance of Italian comedy in which the action took place in dumb show, so called from the Greek pantomimos , an imitator of all or everything. The Roman mimes or mim i were not theatrical performers, but mutes at funerals, whose function it was to imitate the characteristic actions of the deceased-- e.g. the virtue of generosity.