A HISTORY OF FARCE
Greco-Roman Classical Comedy
Farce is a type of comedy that places exaggerated characters in improbable situations where they face a number of outrageous obstacles. Farces have been around since the early days of western theatre, when the Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes wrote his comedies in the 5 th century BCE. Aristophanes' plays included larger-than-life characters, ridiculous situations, and lots of vulgar humor. For example, Lysistrata depicts the women of warring Athens and Sparta banding together and refusing to have sex with their husbands until the men end the war. Although Aristophanes' plays have the characteristics of farce, they also carry serious social messages through satire. Greek playwrights following Aristophanes focused less on satirical social commentary and more on bawdy humor about romance, marriage, and adultery. These plays were known as New Comedy (opposed to the Old Comedy dominated by Aristophanes). Menander was the most famous New Comedy playwright and, a few centuries after his death, the Roman playwright Plautus began adapting Menander's plays. Plautus (254-184 BCE) became the first great master of farcical comedy, partially because he mastered the convention of mistaken identity. For example, his play The Brothers Manaechmi depicts the mishaps of two sets of identical twins who had been separated at birth but end up in the same city. Brothers Manaechmi and other classical farces are still staged and remain hilarious to today's audiences because, unlike other forms of comedy that derive their humor from spoofing contemporary customs or from puns and wordplay specific to the writer's language, classical farce creates comedy out of the most basic human impulses--the desire for pleasure and the fear of pain.
Farce in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
The term "farce" was first applied to comic plays during the late Middle Ages. The word derives from a French word meaning "to stuff" and was used to describe comic bits inserted ("stuffed") in between scenes in religious plays. Farce gradually emerged as its own theatre form in France in the 15 th century and in England in the 16 th century. In the late 16 th century, Shakespeare wrote the best-known Renaissance farce when he adapted Plautus' Brothers Manaechmi into his Comedy of Errors .
Modern Farce
In the late 19 th century, a new subgenre emerged, known as "bedroom farce." As the name implies, the plots of these plays mainly consisted of sexual affairs (and attempted affairs). Bedroom farce is best exemplified in the plays of Georges Feydeau, such as A Flea in her Ear , which involves a quarrelling couple trying to make one another jealous by planning trysts at a hotel. The climactic scene in this and other bedroom farces is set in a room with several doors leading to bedrooms. Much of the humor arises as one character enters through a door and just misses another character exiting through another. Because doors are so central to the humor in these plays, they are also sometimes referred to as "door farces."
Farce Today
Many of the farces written today are door farces, including Ken Ludwig's Moon Over Buffalo . Like their forebears, today's farcical playwrights create exaggerated characters and place them in ridiculous sitations, then make them fall down a lot as they pursue their desires. Filmmakers have also embraced farce. From the Marx brothers to the Farrelly brothers, farcical movies have been and continue to be extremely popular in the U.S. and abroad. Although it is one of the oldest forms of theatre, farce is still thriving and promises to continue making us laugh in times to come.
