farce

farce, a comic dramatic piece that uses highly improbable situations, stereotyped characters, extravagant exaggeration, and violent horseplay. The term also refers to the class or form of drama made up of such compositions. Farce is generally regarded as intellectually and aesthetically inferior to comedy in its crude characterizations and implausible plots, but it has been sustained by its popularity in performance and has persisted throughout the Western world to the present.

Antecedents of farce are found in ancient Greek and Roman theatre, both in the comedies of Aristophanes and Plautus and in the popular native Italian fabula Atellana, entertainments in which the actors played stock character types—such as glutton, graybeard, and clown—who were caught in exaggerated situations.

It was in 15th-century France that the term farce was first used to describe the elements of clowning, acrobatics, caricature, and indecency found together within a single form of entertainment. Such pieces were initially bits of impromptu buffoonery inserted by actors into the texts of religious plays—hence the use of the Old French word farce, “stuffing.” Such works were afterward written independently, the most amusing of the extant texts being Maistre Pierre Pathelin (c. 1470). French farce spread quickly throughout Europe, notable examples being the interludes of John Heywood in 16th-century England. Shakespeare and Molière eventually came to use elements of farce in their comedies.

Farce continued throughout the 18th and 19th centuries; in France, Eugène-Marin Labiche’s Le Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851; An Italian Straw Hat) and Georges Feydeau’s La Puce à l’oreille (1907; A Flea in Her Ear) were notable successes. Farce also surfaced in music hall, vaudeville, and boulevard entertainments.

Farce survived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in such plays as Charley’s Aunt (1892) by Brandon Thomas and found new expression in film comedies with Charlie Chaplin, the Keystone Kops, and the Marx Brothers. The farces presented at the Aldwych Theatre, London, between the world wars were enormously popular, and numerous successful television comedy shows attest to the durability of the form. Examples from the second half of the century are the Italian Dario Fo’s Morte accidentale di un anarchico (1974; Accidental Death of an Anarchist), Michael Frayn’s Noises Off (1982), and Alan Ayckbourn’s Communicating Doors (1995).