Why do we laugh at a farce? Because otherwise we would have to cry.
- As Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it, “Farce is nearer tragedy than comedy is.”
- Oscar Wilde said, “Life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.”
- For the darkest vision, Shakespeare said. “All of creation is a farce. Man was born as a joke. In his head, his reason is buffeted like wind-blown smoke.”
Farce is also the most difficult form of drama to write, and humanity suffers through decades and centuries without the creation of a truly great farce. Tragedies and comedies abound. Farce is the rarest treasure in the theatre.
Joining the distinguished list, winner of the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy, is The Play That Goes Wrong. But how does it live up to inclusion in our empathy gym? From the authors’ production notes: “The actors of the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society are not bad actors, but the victims of unfortunate circumstances. The comedy comes from their unwavering endeavor to continue, the bad choices they make in trying to get out the situations they find themselves in and their optimistic belief that their luck will change.”
How well we know how that feels. Every day we rise, and despite the broken shoelace, the empty gas tank, the crack in the sidewalk, the unexpected hailstorm, we soldier on. “Life is the farce which everyone has to perform,” the poet Rimbaud wisely observed. There is an absurdity, an inherent unfairness to human life. As Karl Marx pointed out, “History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, then as a farce.” The word farce means both a certain kind of dramatic play, and the sense that life is an absurd joke.
Again, from the playwrights’ notes: “Everything must of course be played for truth and not for laughs or parody.” What makes us laugh is how earnestly the characters keep trying to make the best of a bad situation, how they live in denial of the depth of the calamity befalling them, how they keep their hopes high and never give up trying to fix the insoluble problems. They are adorable. And we know them to be like we are. And so we laugh — with them, not at them. But in our laughter there lies a reverence for the dogged persistence and eternal hopefulness we all share.
San Francisco Playhouse
450 Post St.
San Francisco, CA 94102
(415) 677-9596
(c) 2024 San Francisco Playhouse
A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Tax ID: 86-1089699
Privacy Policy | Accessibility
