Farce: A History from Aristophanes to Woody Allen

by Albert Bermel

Farce elicits an immediate, elemental response from all age levels, cutting across national and intellectual boundaries. It dates back to people’s first attempts to scoff in public at whatever their neighbors cherished in social prestige, eccentricities, virtues that are vices, friendships, and enmities. Albert Bermel, teacher, writer, and translator of farce, takes readers on an instructive and hilarious voyage from the classical Greek stage through English Restoration and French farce, to the young Hollywood of Mack Sennett, Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, the other silent farceurs of the Jazz Age, and on to W. C. Fields, Mae West, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Monty Python—including other greats along the way like Hope and Crosby, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers.

464 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

A respected theatre critic for The New Leader and a published playwright, author, and translator of classical works for the modern theater.

Reviews

[Bruce · Rating 3 out of 5]

For those who demand precision in their taxonomies, I’m not confident I could wholly say what distinguishes farce from straight comedy. It’s certainly a more extreme (outrageous?) vehicle for mining laughter. Albert Bermel wrote this whole book that surveys the subject without offering much help. Two pages into his first chapter (page 14 as published), he writes, “I haven’t come across a plausible definition and I won’t attempt one.” He then proceeds to consider common elements he finds farcical, name-checks some of the plays in which they appear, provides mini-bios of their respective authors and times in more or less chronological order, and otherwise quotes from, synopsizes, and analyzes selected works through the mid-’80s over around 440 pages. (It’s the same technique I pretty much use in this review and the others I’ve written about anthologies.)

While I find his brush -- which includes Dada, graffiti, and limericks -- a bit overbroad, his catalogue is still a pretty decent read: friendly in tone and not without the occasional insights. Here’s his parting shot at Plautus (pp. 75-6):

These plays comprise, for me, at any rate, one of the theater’s conundrums.... When A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum telescoped many of Plautus’ plots, scrambled together characters from various plays, added show-biz wisecracks and music, and burst open on Broadway in 1962, the old impressions [of “just about every theater historian that Plautus’ plays were specimens of rollicking farce”] were confirmed.... But the beauty of [a French production of The Pot of Gold later in the 1960s] explained... that what we choose to name a genre such as farce depends as much on performance as on the malleable text. One director’s farce is another’s ballet.

Before I started researching farce examples and critiques, I had originally thought of farce strictly as a comedy of errors, one in which miscommunications mount inexorably until the ending catharsis at which point all was set aright. Since I’m willing to accept the possibility of shared traits among literary genres (audience expectation determining whether offstage sound effects are heard as silly or suspenseful) or differences by degree (see, slapstick versus torture porn), my view hasn’t altered all that much. The way I see it, farce is tragedy performed as a comedy, or at least, farce bears the same relationship to the humorous story that tragedy does to (melo)drama. Farcical and tragic tales each require characters who are respectively incapable of escaping their destinies. A razor’s edge distinguishes the ridiculous from the regrettable, a fine line between lighthearted and serious play, what Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. To better understand the works paraded in Bermel’s and Bentley’s anthologies, I propose to unpack both grin and grim. Nonetheless, I stand with drama critic Eric Bentley (see, e.g., “The Psychology of Farce” at pp. xviii and xix, which forms the introduction to his anthology Let's Get a Divorce) in thinking that nearly everything that can be said of farce holds equally true for tragedy.

As Albert Bermel writes in the book of French farces he edited, “Farces famously thrive on coincidence that leads to misidentifications and misunderstandings.” (p. 397) Farce exposes people’s pretence to rational behavior by hilariously frustrating their best intentions, underscoring the law of unintended consequences, and undermining their expectations. Those expecting chaos are greeted with inexplicable calm. Those who wish to remain calm find ever-heightening layers of confusion. On pp. 10-11 of the one-act anthology Feydeau First to Last, editor/translator Norman Shapiro explains that full-length “Constructions typical of the minutely ordered build-up of insignificant cause into gigantic, often nightmarish effect, spread over three (and sometimes more) acts of mounting frenzy before the inevitable happy, if gratuitous, ending.” He affectionately describes the genre as “Slamming doors and madcap romps from bed to bed.” The bed to bed aspect may be true of Georges Feydeau’s Un fil a la Patte (“Not by Bed Alone”) or Occupe-toi d’Amelie (“Keep an Eye on Amelie”) and Blake Edwards’ output (I’m thinking chiefly here of A Shot in the Dark and Victor/Victoria), but to my mind, the best farces will be infernal machines with a wicked, precise logic whatever its milieu. Thus, Neil Simon’s celebration of slamming doors in Rumors, Larry Gelbart’s amalgamation of Plautus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum or his dragshow satire Tootsie, Billy Wilder’s dragshow Some Like it Hot, W. S. Gilbert’s slave of duty in Pirates of Penzance, Tristram Shandy’s incapacity to even assemble a meaningful biography, and so on down through the ages.

The success of farce and tragedy alike depend on the credibility of inevitability, that those around whom the plot revolves behave in a consistent and believable fashion; protagonists and antagonists each appearing to take initiative as masters of changing circumstances rather than victims of unprecedented events. In reality, theirs is only a semblance of mastery. Each character is a puppet of fate. I admire authors who can pull off this kind of story, especially those who can do so with consistent (generally accelerating) pacing: The Hangover and Bridesmaids, Weekend at Bernie’s, The Producers, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, The Pink Panther Strikes Again (the craziest episode pitting Peter Sellers against Herbert Lom), Dirty Rotten Scoundrels’ con artist competition, Where’s Charley, Adventures in Babysitting, almost the entire output of Gilbert and Sullivan and the Coen Brothers (I eagerly await the Coen Brothers’ take on Iolanthe), Teen Wolf… okay, maybe not Teen Wolf. I think making these worlds believable (or at least internally consistent) is critical to making them effective and satisfying. Done properly, my ideal farce/tragedy is a marvel of compression, a puzzle designed such that each piece serves multiple purposes, fits perfectly with and flows logically into all other moving parts, and cannot be removed without jeopardizing the integrity of the entire structure. Deus ex machinae are unsatisfying precisely because they fall outside the preestablished boundaries of the plot.

That being said, I don’t think it’s controversial to argue that the key distinction between farce and tragedy is the author’s proposed contract with the audience. Farces imply that any confusion engendered by misinterpretations of identity, intention, and/or situation have limited or temporary consequences to those with whom the audience is asked to identify. Circumstances are ticklish, but not painful, for the most part including justifiable pricks to pride, dignity, and expectation. Serious cruelties (permanent injury to life, limb, psyche, or sanity) are visited only upon the deserving, hateful, or alien. By contrast, tragedy drowns its heroes’ increasingly desperate attempts to keep their heads above water. King Lear and Frank Underwood see their respective empires destroyed, Carmen’s flirtatious taunting results in mortal humiliation (Samuel Barber’s Vanessa is a gender-swapped version of Fatal Attraction in which Michael Douglas’ wife takes the kids and leaves him), a vicious bullying cycle turns a promising prom night into the bitter self-fulfilling prophecy of Carrie’s mother. Humanist Robert Oppenheimer’s intellectual triumph is his (and humanity’s) lasting sorrow. Farce and tragedy each traffic heavily in irony and double entendre, often to the same cathartic effect, the difference is that farce ends with the audience’s facepalm and tragedy with their banging their heads against a tree.

Again, letting Bermel speak to his own diabolical Dozen French Farces:

One of the more popular coincidences, often having fruitful results, is identical-seeming roles, actual or pretended. The contrivance, in a pure form...appears in two earlier plays by Moliere (The Flying Doctor and Amphitryon), in several by Shakespeare (The Comedy of Errors, Much Ado About Nothing, and Twelfth Night), and others lifted from Plautus’ Menaechmi and Amphitryon.... Movies are especially hospitable to look-alikes, sound-alikes, and dress-alikes.... [T]he farces in this book… make use of two similar expedients, namely impersonation and mistaken identity.... The twelve farces do have one [more] characteristic in common: satire in the form of ridicule.... Several of these farces incorporate profusions and confusions of entrances and exits. Some borrow other qualities we associate with Farce, such as secrets (apparently negligible information) withheld until late moments,... unashamed roughhousing and slapstick,... humor that presents... roles as unintentionally funny because of what they cannot help being.

My feeling is that farce exposes people’s pretence to rational behavior by hilariously frustrating their best intentions, underscoring the law of unintended consequences, and undermining their expectations. Those expecting chaos are greeted with inexplicable calm. Those who wish to remain calm find ever-heightening layers of confusion. It is along these lines that physical schtick and its accompanying mayhem will ever remain cornerstones of farce and the staple of most TV ads, sitcoms, and animated works (nor is it at all dead in the theater). If the humor of a good pratfall is universalist, the laughs come as much or more in the attempted recovery of human dignity that immediately follows the slapstick than in the physical contortions and distortions on display.

Among the many elements I have cited that contribute to effective farce, I think pacing is among the most critical. The audience, as much as the characters themselves, should not be given time to catch their breath or think. Farce is an unspooling tableau of madness, and madness arises less from reflection than from pure, instinctive reaction. Back to Bentley, in sexistly introducing his sextet of silliness (at p. xx):

A feature that has nearly always been considered a merely technical, literary, or theatrical fact is the swift tempo of farce. Men of the theatre encourage actors in farce to “get a move on” for the sake of slick showmanship, that is, to avoid boring the audience…. No wonder “slow” productions are dull! No wonder expert critics of the genre, like Sarcey, describe the verve of farce as endiable! The devil is in farce rhythm. Although the great farceurs drive with a very firm rein, they are trick artists and like to give the impression of being behind a runaway horse… The chase was to be the pride and glory of the Keystone Cops.

Too, speed tends to add poignancy to already well-turned lines not least by creating the illusion of wit -- a willful illusion given the primary convention of any fictional work being the audience’s willing forfeiture of awareness that the play is pre-scripted. (I write this knowing that a primary advantage of farce lies in its audience’s appreciation for defiance of convention, which means that farce is one of the few genres not just permitted but encouraged of breaking the fourth wall.)

Considering French farce as a whole, I confess to being a big Moliere fan. From the 19th century, my favorites remain any libretti that Jacques Offenbach has set to music. From the 20th century... well, the recent past has (fortunately!) not winnowed down all the various farcical offerings from stage, screen, and broadcast to allow any kind of thoroughgoing sample, but...

Oh, alright, I'll confess that in addition to the other works cited above, after Jean-Paul Sartre and Irish ex-pat Samuel Beckett my taste in turns primarily (entirely?) to farces by native English speakers (I also have a preference for satire, which is not to say that I see firewalls between genres). George Abbott. Woody Allen. Charlie Chaplin. Nora Ephron. William Goldsmith. Harold Ramis. Not a complete list by any means.

If you’re looking to read a survey of works from different authors, Bermel’s and Bentley’s respective collections are not bad places to begin. I enjoyed half of Bermel’s and two-thirds of Bentley’s samples. When I enter my respective reviews of Bermel, Bentley, Feydeau, and Moliere (and probably Plautus and Terence, anthologies of whose works I am reading at the time of posting this), I will be sure to include brief synopses of (most of) the plots found within and at least one excerpt of representative dialogue.

Goodness. I just realized I've been at this for nearly two years now, and my own farce is not yet finished. Ha! It is to laugh.

*** UPDATE, March, 2014: Finished my reading draft of A Manor Farce this month with a reading scheduled for late April. No doubt the reading will help identify a vast constellation of holes... which I will then most likely need another two years to patch. *Sigh*

[Al Pacina]

The book itself is a farce. The author provides a lot of examples but gives a very personal definition of the genre. His references to the other theatrical trends is also very approximative and lack seriousness. Of course, he warns us in his introduction that he wanted to write a reference book on farce that would be accessible to everybody and not only students and scholars, but vulgarization should not mean over-simplication and far-fetched interpretation (my "favourite" one being: "Farce comes from the French word "stuffed" thus this genre can include a lot of different genres within itself", go on! that's a bit ridiculous isn't it)