'Finally It Changes Nothing'

In the vernacular, “farce” is applied to anything ridiculous and usually fraudulent, such as warning labels on packs of cigarettes, “non-fiction novels” and Congress. At the heart of farce is contrast – between the stated and actual, ideal and real, advertising and product. Farce is not found in nature. It’s strictly a human quality, part of our essentially overweening nature. Max Beerbohm wrote of “The Importance of Being Earnest”: 

“What differentiates this farce from any other, and makes it funnier than any other, is the humorous contrast between its style and matter. To preserve its style fully, the dialogue must be spoken with grave unction.”

 

Precisely why silent comedies, especially Buster Keaton’s, are funnier than most sound comedies. Keaton is the master of “grave unction.” The obvious exception is W.C. Fields. Watch one of his films with the volume turned off and you’re only missing about sixty-three percent of his humor. In the Autumn 1990 issue of The Threepenny Review, Irving Howe published a brief essay, “Fiction and Farce.” Howe quotes Mack Sennett, the silent film producer, who said the job of farce is to act out “the fall of dignity.” For “dignity” read pride, pomposity, pretentiousness. Farce flays our precious self-image and rationalizations, leaving us, as Lear says, “unaccommodated man . . . a poor, bare, fork’d animal.” Howe writes of the genre as opposed strictly to the vernacular usage:

 

“Farce does not compromise, neither is it kind. It hits below the belt. It flattens out the refinements that sensitive people value. It is a sort of fart among genres. It levels us all to an ultimate equality: man on his ass. There are few metaphysical consolations or ennobling ends in farce, certainly nothing like those we impute to comedy; there is only the putdown or the social demolition which gleefully levels the world . . .”

 

No one would wish to confine all of his reading and viewing to farce, a genre incapable of expressing sublimity or the subtler human qualities.  Tolstoy the man could be farcical; never War and Peace. Howe again:

 

“Farce brings pleasure through humiliation--knock him down, throw him into the water, hit him again. And then, a sort of magical cancellation: Fatty Arbuckle gets up, blinking with good humor, and the world is restored.”

 

Howe the literary critic notes that farce could never sustain the entirety of a good novel. At best, he suggests, it’s a useful subplot, as in Smollett’s and Fielding’s novels. One of the many reasons Catch-22 (not mentioned by Howe, though substantiating his point) is such a lousy novel is that Heller reduces everything to farce, resulting in hollow tedium.

 

“Nor does farce fool with transcendence,” Howe writes, rather self-evidently. “Its philosophy is a rude pragmatism, even if its ultimate negations assert a bitter truth: that sprawled out on the pavement or adorned with a pair of horns, we are all equally ridiculous-- well, more or less. And farce does not provide an austere catharsis or good- spirited sociability. Even as it seems to undermine everything, finally it changes nothing.”