FARCE.

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Farce.

Farce is a genre of comedy distinguished by extremely exaggerated and humorous circumstances as well as foolish and one-dimensional characters. Its sole purpose is to make others laugh. A farce's plot frequently has several twists and random events, such as mistaken identities and misunderstanding. To generate laughter, this form of comedy relies on intentional absurdity, physical humour,  jokes, and so on.

A farce's fundamental goal is to make the audience laugh and entertain them. Farce generates laughs through absurdity, crude jokes, and physical actions. Farces are frequently episodic or short in duration, and are frequently situated in a single area where all events take place. Farces have always been performed on stage and in films.

Farces can be created for both theater and cinema. Films like “Home alone”, “The Three Stooges”, “The Hangover”  can be termed as farces. Farcical plays include William Shakespeare’s, “Comedy of Errors”, “Taming of the Shrew”, Joe Orton’s “What the Butler Saw”, Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off”, Marc Camoletti’s “Boeing-Boeing” are some examples of farcical plays.

Farcical humour draws into some of our most basic behaviours. People falling down; absurd, ridiculous situations; cakes to the face: all of these things make us giggle for mysterious, yet universal, reasons.

 

Farces are also popular because they develop in a way that appears more or less realistic, despite the fact that the outcomes are highly ridiculous. That is, the characters make judgements that appear to make sense given the circumstances, but at each turn, things get increasingly absurd. This gradual build-up makes a comedy seem believable, despite the plotlines being so impossible and absurd.

 

In ancient Greek theatre, a brief "satyr play" was frequently performed in between tragedies. These plays employed vulgar but effective types of humour, particularly sexual jokes and physical comedy. The objective was to provide some comedic relief to the audience in between the harsh emotional experiences of the tragedies. Satyr plays are thought to have inspired modern farces.

In Comedy of Errors, for instance, there are two sets of identical twins who frequently get confused for one another. (In fact, this play was so influential that “comedy of errors” is sometimes used as a general term to describe farcical stories.)