In 1877 the Italian-Egyptian playwright, journalist, and public intellectual Yaʿqub Sanuʿ began publishing a satirical newspaper called Abu Naddara Zarqa (The Man with the Blue Glasses). It was banned within the year and its author exiled to France, but for the next thirty years, the journal was smuggled into Egypt amongst less incendiary materials and widely distributed. Sanuʿ was a vocal anti-colonial activist, and the slogans, cartoons, and polemics he published have been identified as partially responsible for the rise of revolutionary and proto-nationalist Egyptian sentiment and even the 1879 ʿUrabi Revolution itself. Yet Abu Naddara was hardly a straightforward mouthpiece for propaganda, or indeed for anything. Profoundly polyglot, its fictional “dialogues” between real and symbolic political figures were expressed in idioms from Hebrew to French to Egyptian colloquial. These satirical “dialogues,” I argue, make a mockery of the theory-praxis distinction that has thus far undergirded understandings of Arabic political activism in the period. Through close readings of a selection of the early dialogues, I suggest that it is here – in a playful linguistic praxis that models the possibilities and limits of transnational, translingual communication – that Abu Naddara’s most interesting theoretical contributions lie. The dialogue draws, among other things, on the colloquial and European-style plays Sanuʿ had also popularized earlier in the century, as well as the tradition of dialectical reasoning found in Arabic kalam and adab. Itself a cultural hybrid, it functions as a kind of laboratory for testing and performing the outcomes of imagined conversation between different figures, groups, and rhetorical traditions. Through acute observations of the period’s language wars, I find, it destroys any nostalgic notion of multilingual cosmopolitanism, turning the inequities structuring linguistic and political exchange in the colonial period to devastating or comic effect. I ask whether it also holds out the tantalizing possibility of a new ethics of the face-to-face, as the foundation for a future political community.