Farce

Properly speaking, a farce is a genre of drama—and more specifically, of comedy. The purpose of a farce is to make the audience laugh as a result of the bizarre situations and characters that are portrayed within the drama. In a more metaphorical sense, though, farce can also be used to situations that are supposed to be serious, but which end up farcical as a result of the incompetence of the people involved. 

Defining farce

A farce is a literary term used to describe a satire or comedy. Webster’s Dictionary defines a farce as “a light dramatic composition marked by broadly satirical comedy and improbable plot.”

Used in the literary and televised arts, a farce takes improbable situations, humor and silliness to entertain. Spoofs – a satirical recreation on an actual film – uses this technique to entertain its audiences.

However, the term has taken as many twists in recent, and not so recent, years. A farce has commonly come to be known as a something serious that’s become comical. For example, lawyers often refer to out of control trials as a farce.

Usage in literature

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest – This is textbook farce at its best. It contains all the basic elements, including mockery, disgraceful physical humor, absurdity, and mistaken identities. Click here to read more about Oscar Wilde.

Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer – Goldsmith uses farce to show an example of error comedy and how not to do something.

But how does one use farce in literature and dramatized plays?

Step 1: The first ingredient for a farce is an unrealistic situation or event. The more absurd you make the story, the better the outcomes. For example, Scary Movie uses several unrealistic events that are just absurd to the core.

Step 2: Make it funny. A farce is not a farce without the comedy. 

Step 3: A guaranteed way of winning with farce is recreation – a false recreation that is. As mentioned previously, spoofs have nailed the farce nail directly on the head. First take a movie with box office success (i.e. multimillion dollar success), rewrite the storyline to include absurd moments, throw in a little mockery of the stars, and, voila, instant farce stardom.

Etymology and background history of farce

The word developed from Late Latin farsus, connected with a verb meaning "to stuff." Thus, an expansion or amplification in the church liturgy was called a farce. Later, in France, farce meant any sort of extemporaneous addition in a play, especially jokes or gags, the clownish actors speaking "more than was set down" for them. 

In the late seventeenth century farce was used in England to mean any short humorous play, as distinguished from regular five-act comedy. The development in these plays of elements of low comedy is responsible for the modern meaning of farce: a dramatic piece intended to excite laughter and depending lee son plot and character than on improbably situations, the humor arising from gross incongruities, coarse wit, or horseplay. 

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.” You may never see a farce in dissertation writing, but our research paper writers are ready to write about a farce or use one in an essay at your request.