Favourite farce?

[aces25]

Posted: 11/7/17 at 2:30pm

What's your favourite and funniest farce? 

[After Eight]

Posted: 11/7/17 at 2:39pm

La Farce de Maître Pathelin.

[BwayLB]

Posted: 11/7/17 at 2:40pm

Back in my senior year my high school did a holiday production of You Can't Take It With You. Or as I think of it as a Depression era Guess Who's Coming to Dinner but an all White cast (no joke or insult intended) I cameoed as a police cop. Just the way it expresses the difference between two different American social classes is full of humor and beautiful.

[TheGingerBreadMan]

Posted: 11/7/17 at 5:10pm

See How They Run by Philip King.

[BroadwayRox3588]

Posted: 11/7/17 at 5:19pm

I really love A Flea in Her Ear and You Can't Take It With You

[Ado Annie D'Ysquith]

Posted: 11/8/17 at 8:13am

Would On the 20th Century count? I know it's a musical, but it's so absurdly, delightfully melodramatic. Plus the whole "She's a Nut" sequence is pure theatrical magic as far as I'm concerned.

[BwayLB]

Posted: 11/8/17 at 8:52am

BroadwayRox3588 said: "I really love A Flea in Her Ear and You Can't Take It With You"

My high school did Flea in Her Ear too. I just watched it in my freshman year. But Can't Take It With You is better

Updated On: 11/8/17 at 08:52 AM

[Inigomontoya]

Posted: 11/8/17 at 8:57am

Funny money by Ray Cooney 

[stage-n-screen]

Posted: 11/8/17 at 9:46am

Tie:

Noises Off

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

[henrikegerman]

Posted: 11/8/17 at 11:05am

Ado Annie D'Ysquith said: "Would On the 20th Century count? I know it's a musical, but it's so absurdly, delightfullymelodramatic. Plusthe whole "She's a Nut" sequence is pure theatrical magic as far as I'm concerned."

Even if we aren't considering musicals, OTTC is based on a play, Hecht and MacArthur's "Twentieth Century."

My answer:  The Importance of Being Earnest.

 

[Kad]

Posted: 11/8/17 at 11:07am

Discussions about race on BWW.

[Patash]

Posted: 11/8/17 at 11:33am

I was surprised to see You Can't Take It With You as a farce.  I guess it has some farcical overtones, but I think of it more as a comedy than a farce.  And The Importance of Being Earnest?  I think a British comedy of manners is hardly a farce.

I'd have to go with A Flea in Her Ear -- TRUE farce from beginning to end.  The Play That Goes Wrong is certainly my favorite farce production of recent times, although I'm not sure the play itself matches in quality to something like A Flea in Her Ear.  And frankly, I think Noises Off is a beautifully written farce. 

[BwayLB]

Posted: 11/8/17 at 11:37am

^ To be honest, I think of Can't Take It With You as more of a simple romantic comedy than an actual farce too

[dramamama611]

Posted: 11/8/17 at 11:45am

It's not a farce.  

 

Comedy and Farce are NOT interchangeable, people.

 

Farce:  a comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay and typically including crude characterization and ludicrously improbable situations.

[Phantom4ever]

Posted: 11/8/17 at 11:48am

Three's Company

[Patash]

Posted: 11/8/17 at 12:10pm

I do recall a college prof saying "the quality of a farce is in direct proportion to the number of door slams in it".

 

[Alex Kulak2]

Posted: 11/8/17 at 12:21pm

My senior year of high school, we did a play called Play On! which is a total knockoff of Noises Off, except that I recently read Noises Off and I like Play On! better.

[henrikegerman]

Posted: 11/8/17 at 12:41pm

Patash, I think a case could be made for it being either or both.  It is typically called a "farcical comedy."
And i see little reason to deny that it is a "high farce"given its most pervasive qualities.   It's smothered in farcical tropes (silliness reigns throughout, along with outlandish coincidences, mistaken and assumed identities,  and pronounced character eccentricities).  Its inciting incident is as light as a feather (Jack's use of a fake younger brother named Ernest to explain his need to get to town).  And the first major complication is as a light as a feather (Gwendolyn's insistence that she marry a man named Ernest).


"It is of nonsense all compact, and better nonsense, I think, our stage has not seen."  A.B. Walkley

Updated On: 11/8/17 at 12:41 PM

[sinister teashop]

Posted: 11/8/17 at 7:59pm

"You Can't Take it With You" is most definitely a farce. And Kaufman and his collaborators masterfully adapted European stage farce for the American audience. I don't think there's a specific rule for what constitutes a farce. All the word means is "stuffed" as in a simple plot stuffed with incidents. But Kaufman and his collaborators use what I think is a necessity in a great stage farce and that is to build to a point of what seems like "no return" for the characters. In the French farce that would mean the public exposure of a respectable character's indiscretion and his expulsion from society. But then in the final act, after chaos has thrown order to the winds, all the pieces come back down almost magically into a proper bourgeois order saving the day. That happens like clockwork in Feydeau and it also happens to a great extent in most of Kaufman & Co's plays. There's a feeling of mechanization in farce.

Updated On: 11/8/17 at 07:59 PM

[Dollypop]

Posted: 11/8/17 at 9:32pm

.Noises Off!

See How They Run

Run for Your Wife

Lend Me A Tenor

Updated On: 11/8/17 at 09:32 PM

[raddersons]

Posted: 11/8/17 at 10:42pm

To me, a farce’s primary comedic attributes must involve lots of physical comedy. Importance of Being Earnest involves basically none. It’s a brillaint play, but it’s high-brow humor —or rather, low brow humor played highly.

Boeing Boeing really nails it for me. i remember crying in the theater from laughing so hard. But if it’s not done right, it can drag real hard.

[South Fl Marc]

Posted: 11/9/17 at 8:29am

"Tartuffe" .

This brilliant farce on Religious Hypocrisy is just as relevant now as it was in the 17th century when it was written.

[Wee Thomas2]

Posted: 11/11/17 at 4:42pm

I hate farce.  Noises Off is my least favorite show of all time and it's not even close.

 

That being said, I loved La Bete.  Rylance can overcome anything.

[Taryn]

Posted: 11/11/17 at 7:51pm

Rumors and Noises Off are two favorites of mine that first come to mind.

It's not a farce if there aren't door slams!

[Jazpr321]

Posted: 11/13/17 at 12:06pm

The Increased Difficulty of Concentration

By Vaclav Havel

That play will make your brain positively spin

Semi-related musing: on a scale of 1 to Farce, how much of a Farce is the play Born Yesterday?