Rules of Farce

From Sherry Kramer

FARCE*
Farce has three basic attributes:
1. Brutality
2. Unreality--how characters get into situation is improbable
3. Objectivity--puppet master, emotional involvement with characters is lessened. Don’t need to care about the characters. Distance is kept most if not all the time

Of course, unreality is objective and brutality is unreal. To enhance unreality of character, often are put under a spell, drugged, beaten until in a stupor, or drunk
Farce is totally real and totally absurd simultaneously. Characters do not know that they are funny.

Additional elements:
indestructible characters
objects as antagonists, objects often act as main characters
doors--exits and entrances happen swiftly
accessible, easy to enter
crude
characters seldom murdered or badly injured
farce is a laughter releasing mechanism
audience is often privileged, knows more than characters

Farce environment--a seductive world of promises and a malign world of traps.--Albert Bermel
Farce is a destroyer, and detractor--a negating force. Farce is favored by writers in formative years--when they get older, they are attached to stories of union and compassion, rather than dissolution, free sequence, and irrationality. Farce flouts the bounds of reason, good taste, fairness, sanity.

It utilizes two laughter releasing mechanisms--
1. Characters who are only partially engaging
2. improbable situations in which we’re caught up

Often the main character will be outsiders coming into a world, someone who doesn’t fit--but must survive in this world whether they fit or not fit. Outsiders are often responsible for change, making changes and being changed
Slap stick--literally, a blunt wooden stick used in commedia de arte, gave a sharp cracking sound when someone is struck with it--an artificial, heightened sound

In farce, characters seldom get badly injured, and almost never die. Human bodies are sponges for punishment because THE AUDIENCE MUST LAUGH. In modern farce, people do die.

Farce shrinks the difference in consciousness between objects and people. These objects yearn to be used for purposes they were never intended for, and they turn treacherous at every turn. And there is the coming of the machine--a gun is a machine, belonging to an intermediate stage between things and people. Machines are extensions of people, and extension of things. They have assumed in farce some of the tasks of servants and slaves.