May the Farce Be With You

by Roger Foss

  Molière more than likely re-jigged his scripts, and we know that Ben Travers at the Aldwych and Brian Rix’s Whitehall writers constantly made radical changes, even after plays had officially opened. Rix once revealed that not more than twenty minutes of the original script for Simple Spymen remained in the final production. Old skool writer, Ray Cooney, continues to impose huge demands on himself in order to get perfect laughs. Given the colossal creative pressures, perhaps it’s no wonder that any writer or actor under thirty with even a sliver of farce in their funny bone now heads straight for television, radio or film.

  Meanwhile, comedy itself is changing, the diversity of comedians and types of comedy reflecting the diversity in audiences. Stand-up is big business. Comedy is everywhere. Britain is no longer a nation of shopkeepers but a nation of comedy clubbers. Laughter tracks are in; genuine laughter is out. Observational comedy is in; joke-based comedy is out. In-yer-face verbals are in; double entendres are out. Rude is in; risqué is out. Offensive is in; inoffensive is out.

  ‘One must surprise an audience out of its expectations,’ Joe Orton told Plays and Players magazine just after Loot had opened in the West End in 1966, two years before the abolition of theatre censorship in England. Not surprisingly, when he was doing his utmost to shock audiences out of their moral rut by getting riotous farcical comedy out of a corpse, sexual deviation, corrupt policemen and the Catholic Church, Orton had plenty of close run-ins with the censor. But like all of the great farce writers before him, the trick was to find ways to subvert the prevailing moral codes through all those traditional farcical contraptions of artful ambiguity, wicked wit, dodgy double meanings and innocent innuendo – all the comedy contraptions that are now no longer ‘in’.

  Ben Travers was writing Aldwych farces when sex was even more a mortal sin than it was in the 1960s. As he recalled in a 1975 interview, ‘The whole basis, the motive for everything, was that the characters wanted to go to bed with each other. People had the idea that because the censor objected to it, the public would object to it, which was a false idea. People love to have a near the knuckle laugh.’

  Apart from the mirthless politically correct brigade and dangerous religious neo-Nazis, nobody wants censorship to return. Even so, farce only truly thrives on a certain kind of edgy nervous tension between the forbidden and the funny – on taking the audience very near to the knuckle, yet not near enough to knock them senseless.

  Over the centuries, farceurs have sought ever more innovative ways to flex their knuckles and subvert the prevailing social, personal and moral rules, sexual or otherwise. What hope is there for the wannabe twenty-first-century farceur when the required skills are fading fast, when there are no limits to comedy, when there are no rules to subvert, when witty innuendo has been replaced by expletives, or when the neurotic desire to shock and awe an audience into laughter becomes far more important to today’s so-called ‘edgy’ comedy establishment than comedy itself.

  British farce may not be at its wits’ end. But it’s getting pretty close.

  8. Fifty Farces to See Before You Die Laughing

  ACuckoo in the Nest (1925) Risqué comedy of misunderstandings, in which a married man and a married woman, who used to be engaged to each other, must share the same room for a night. Ben Travers adapted his 1922 novel as a gap-filler for the Aldwych Theatre team, which already had a smash hit with Tons of Money. Travers said he wrote it ‘as a comment, in jaunty form, on the state of the divorce law, which said that any unmarried couple who spent a night together in an hotel must, incontestably, be guilty of adultery.’ Catch the 1933 film version, which is virtually a record of the original stage production, to see the Aldwych farceurs in action.

  A Fish Called Wanda (1988) No wonder this ‘tale of murder, lust, greed, revenge, and seafood’ is one of the funniest British films of all time: John Cleese wrote the script and directed alongside Ealing Comedies veteran Charles Crichton. Cleese has acknowledged a debt to the great French farceurs: ‘There was a time when I used to go to the National Theatre regularly, and they would do very, very good French farces, particularly Feydeau, and I just admired them hugely, because they were wonderfully funny. First, the emotions in farce are more intense than they are in ordinary comedy, and the result is that there’s more energy, and therefore bigger laughs at stake. When you combine that with the intellectual perfection of the clockwork, it’s profoundly satisfying.’

  A Flea in Her Ear (1907) Georges Feydeau at the height of his farcical powers. Hellishly cruel comedy, funny foreigners, speech impediments, mistaken identities, revolving beds, rampaging husbands, lusty servants, mayhem, misunderstandings – plus a good deal of hopping in and out of the sheets at the appropriately named Hotel Coq d’Or. John Mortimer’s adaptation for the National Theatre production in 1966, directed by the Comédie-Française’s Jacques Charon, is still the benchmark English translation. Mortimer’s ubiquitous definition of farce aptly sums up the entanglements of Feydeau’s adulterous and avaricious worthies in fin-de-siècle Paris as ‘tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute’. Rex Harrison and Rosemary Harris starred in the 1968 film, also directed by Charon. It’s not funny for one minute.

  A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962) Plautus-inspired musical romp woven around an inspired score by Stephen Sondheim and hilarious book by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart proves that music and farce can go together, like comedy and tragedy. A right Roman laugh-a-thon.

  An Italian Straw Hat (1851) Eugène Labiche and Marc Michel’s surrealist nightmare. A missing hat, a lady’s honour at stake, a bewildered wedding-party in pursuit, an endless stream of comic misunderstandings... Many comedians and directors have acknowledged their debt to Labiche, including Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel, Jacques Tati and Jerry Lewis. The 1927 silent movie version directed by René Clair is a film comedy classic. Also adapted as a musical and a ballet.

  The Bear (1888) Chekhov’s early short plays are based on his stories, succinct little one-act farces, or ‘Vaudevilles’, with a typical tragi-comic feel to them.

  The Bed Before Yesterday (1976) Shortly before his 90th birthday, Ben Travers revisited farce and became a Seventies swinger with this sex comedy minus the double meaning and innocent innuendo of his earlier work. Rarely revived.

  Bedroom Farce (1975) Alan Ayckbourn in typical farcical mode at a housewarming party, where four married couples who are at different stages in their relationships find their lives intersect over the course of a chaotic evening.

  Black Comedy (1965) Ingenious groundbreaking one-act farce by Peter Shaffer. A fuse blows, but the blackout effect is reversed. The actors think they are in the dark, but the action is seen in full-on white light, so the audience sees them bumping into the furniture.

  Boeing-Boeing (1962) Marc Camoletti’s sexy air-hostess farce requires no less than seven doors, three fiancées and at least three different overnight airline bags. ‘It’s geometrical,’ says the philandering Bernard, explaining the way he organises his love life by airline timetables, ‘so precise as to be almost poetic.’ The same can be said of Camoletti’s stratospheric script. Full of sexy goings-on in a French farmhouse, Camoletti’s Don’t Dress For Dinner (1987) is the sequel to Boeing-Boeing – and it’s just as funny-funny.

  Box and Cox (1847) John Maddison Morton was the Eric Sykes of mid-Victorian Britain, writing genuinely popular comedy, often with a surreal edge. This one-act farce is one of his finest and most performed. In 1928 it became the first complete play to be televised by the BBC. See also Morton’s A Most Unwarrantable Intrusion (1849), an artfully conceived one-act ‘Comic Interlude’ in which Mr Snoozle arranges a day at home to himself only to find his cozy Victorian world turned topsy turvy by a mad interloper. Goonery of the first order.

  Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! (1974) Dario Fo, a Nobel Prize winner and Italy’s most celebrated comic playwright and performer, depicts what happens when people refuse to pay spiralling prices in the shops, a kind of fast and furious super
market sweep avoiding the checkout. New productions are encouraged to update the puns and parody with topical themes and improvisations. Fo’s left field brand of populist farcical comedy owes much to the traditions of the commedia dell’arte, circus, jesters, minstrels and political clowns.

  Charley’s Aunt (1892) Lord Fancourt Babberley impersonates Charley’s aunt from Brazil in this hardy perennial of farce. The ‘aunt’, of course, behaves outrageously, smoking cigars and pouring tea into old Mr Spettigue’s hat. It’s been a great role for generations of comedians, the most memorable being Griff Rhys Jones, who won an Olivier Award for it in 1984. Jack Benny starred in the 1941 film version. Arthur Askey wore the frock in Charley’s (Big-Hearted) Aunt in 1940. In a 1969 television adaptation, Danny La Rue was so convincing as the aunt that he entirely blunted the comic point. The musical adaptation, Where’s Charley, is rarely ever staged professionally, but Auntie herself has never retired from the boards.

  Chase Me, Comrade! (1964) A Russian ballet dancer defects to the West, triggering an hilarious game of hide-and-seek in which everybody is pretending to be everybody else. This brilliantly constructed Ray Cooney laughter-fest was a tour-de-farce for Brian Rix who spent most of his time onstage going through increasingly desperate disguises, including a naval officer, a ballet dancer, a ten-foot man and a talking tiger-skin. The last of the original Whitehall farces. Still performable. Somebody should revive it.

  The Comedy of Errors. Double trouble in Shakespeare’s homage to the Roman comedies of Plautus. See also A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and listen to Rodgers and Hart’s musicalisation, The Boys from Syracuse.

  The Court Jester (1956) Danny Kaye stars in the Python-esque story of ‘how the destiny of a nation was changed by a royal birthmark on the royal backside of a royal infant child.’Melvin Frank and Norman Panama’s witty screenplay is packed with verbal buffoonery, including the iconic comic routine ‘The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true! Right?’

  Dad’s Army (1968-1977) Jimmy Perry and David Croft’s scripts for the Walmington-on-Sea platoon of the Home Guard commanded by pompous Captain Mainwaring are full of inspired farcical situations. See Episode 56, in which Mainwaring’s platoon is detailed to guard a captured U-Boat captain and crew.

  Dry Rot (1954) John Chapman’s rollicking post-war comedy about bent bookmakers switching race-horses involves heads popping unexpectedly from secret doors and falling trousers a-plenty. The second of the Whitehall farces, it’s one of the very few farces in the National Theatre’s NT2000 list of significant twentieth-century plays.

  She’s Done It Again (1969) The very best of three anarchic farces written by Michael Pertwee for Brian Rix, it involves a financial scandal and multiple pregnancies. The great Harold Hobson praised its ‘delicious and delirious qualities’. Pertwee followed up with the equally inventive Don’t Just Lie There, Say Something and A Bit Between the Teeth.

  Donkey’s Years (1976) Michael Frayn’s university reunion comedy turns into a classic bedroom farce involving a cabinet minister. A precursor to Frayn’s love letter to farce, Noises Off.

  Duck Soup (1933) The Marx Brothers produced a lot of movies and one comedy masterpiece. This is it.

  Fawlty Towers (1975 and 1979) Only two series and twelve episodes, but the cleverly plotted and superbly choreographed comic complications endured by Basil, Sybil, Manuel and co (and their creators John Cleese and Connie Booth) showed how farce on television can fit perfectly into the traditions of the very best on stage.

  Frasier (1993-2004) Writer Joe Keenan must have had Feydeau in mind when he wrote ‘The Ski Lodge’ episode of Frasier in which Frasier, Niles and the family become embroiled in what turns into a helter-skelter bedroom farce. But then the entire series maintained farce at its heart.

  The Frogs (405 BC) Aristophanes had plenty to croak about in his day, but this Athenian entertainer’s comedies are infrequently performed today.

  The Front Page (1928) Probably the best American farce of the 1920s, in which Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht take satirical sideswipes at a pack of scheming journalists and big city corruption. In fact it was so good they filmed it thrice, the 1940 Howard Hawks version re-titled as His Girl Friday.

  Government Inspector (2011) David Harrower’s new version of the Gogol masterpiece, directed by Richard Jones for the Young Vic, deleted the ‘The’ from the original title and turned a small-town satire into a full-strength Vodka-fuelled hallucinatory farce teetering on the brink of insanity.

  I Love Lucy (1951-1957) Time and time again the all-time comedy genius that was Lucille Ball gets herself embroiled in farcical situations in one of the greatest sitcoms ever to come out of American television.

  The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) With a handbag bulging with clever lines, puns, epigrams and repartees, Oscar Wilde employed farce as a façade for poking fun at Victorian values. A work of genius.

  The Ladies Man (1961) Hardly any nutty gurning here from Jerry Lewis as the handyman at a ladies-only boarding house, but lots of superb slow-burn film comedy, inventive sight gags and farcical set-piece routines, culminating in a ballroom dance with a grim-faced George Raft.

  Lend Me A Tenor (1986) Ken Ludwig’s backstage farce brings chaos, double entendres, scantily clad young women and zany mayhem to the world of provincial opera. A musical adaptation slowed down the farcical comedy but musically hit the right notes.

  La Cage aux Folles (1973) Rediscover Jean Poiret’s original play about what happens when a drag queen and his night club-owning ‘husband’ cover up their relationship to try and appear respectable. It spawned the gloriously funny film, two not quite so funny sequels, a mediocre Hollywood remake and the brilliant stage musical.

  Le Dîner de Cons (1998) Superb movie version of Francis Veber’s 1993 smash-hit farce, in which a group of urbane Parisians amuse themselves by inviting a series of nerds to dinner. Ronald Harwood translated the original play in 2002, re-titled See You Next Tuesday, but it was no match for the film.

  Let’s Get a Divorce (1880) Victorien Sardou was a successful French dramatist, though his well-made plays are seldom performed any more. Bernard Shaw coined the word ‘Sardoodledom’ to describe them. This one flirts like mad with the marriage-go-round and is still perky enough to be revisited.

  Loot (1965) Joe Orton’s first real attempt at farce started out on tour as a disaster but eventually ended up as a successful tour-de-force of bad taste brilliance and funereal humour. Unhappy with the original cast and direction, Orton wrote to his producer ‘Ideally, it should be nearer The Homecoming than I Love Lucy. Don’t think I’m a snob about I Love Lucy. I’ve watched it often. I think it’s very funny. But it’s aimed purely at making an audience laugh. And that isn’t the prime aim of Loot.’

  The Magistrate (1885) Arthur Wing Pinero’s nimble plot tilts at Victorian values by sending a compromised Establishment figure – a nice old metropolitan magistrate – through a moral mangle after he unwittingly visits a dubious hotel.

  Noises Off (1982) The double whammy farce-inside-a-farce by Michael Frayn where offstage is even crazier than onstage and backstage is full of back-stabbing actors and stage managers. Done with the right level energy, it’s a riotous celebration of the old showbiz adage that come what may, ‘the show must go on’. The play premiered in 1982, but Frayn has since rewritten it several times.

  No Sex Please, We’re British (1971) As if to prove there is a wall of cultural snobbery built around popular farce, Alistair Foot and Anthony Marriott’s cracking comedy about an ordinary young couple caught up in a pornography scandal was panned by the critics but ran and ran in the West End.

  One for the Pot (1956) This top-notch Ray Cooney and Tony Hilton laughter machine is still a Rolls-Royce of farces, involving an inheritance claim and a seemingly endless tangle of mistaken identities and hilarious confusions.

  One Man, Two Guvnors (2011) Farcicality and the commedia dell
’arte conventions are constantly popping up in Richard Bean’s ingenious 1960s reworking of Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters, complete with a doddery old servant and a frenzied slapstick food-serving scene.

  Potiche (2010) French farce is very much alive and kicking in French movies, as in this staggeringly sophisticated and extremely funny film from director François Ozon, based on a 1980 stage farce by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Grédy, with Catherine Deneuve as a potiche, or trophy wife, who rebels against her hubbie.

  The Pot of Gold (195BC) Titus Maccius Plautus wasn’t to know that his one-act sitcoms would become the template for broad farcical comedy thereafter, from Shakespeare to the commedia dell’arte and beyond. The Pot of Gold became Molière’s The Miser.

  The Producers (2001) Mel Brooks reckons the musical version of his 1968 film is ‘an old-fashioned, traditional musical comedy.’ It’s also a musical farce to reckon with.

  Run For Your Wife (1982) A bigamist taxi driver’s nightmare of lies and deception spirals into the ultimate Ray Cooney farce.

  See How They Run (1945) Various de-trousered vicars, a bishop, a dopey maid, a repressed spinster and a German POW all run riot in Philip King’s typically British romp. Includes the classic farce line: ‘Sergeant, arrest most of these vicars’.

  Sons of the Desert (1933) Many of the Laurel and Hardy shorts employ farcical situations. Here the two chumps get themselves into another nice mess when they sneak off to a convention while pretending to their wives they are on a medicinal cruise.

  Tartuffe (1664) A hypocritical fraudster masquerades as a holy man and tries to get hold of his friend’s estate by sending him to jail. ‘Such hypocrites are far from rare, In fact you’ll find them everywhere’. Denounced as sacrilegious by the Church, Molière’s biting comedy was banned from public performance by Louis XIV.

  The Servant of Two Masters (1743) Has a permanent place in the catalogue of classic comedies, but someone should blow the cobwebs from Carlo Goldoni’s numerous other comedies and give them a chance to make the grade too. The mirth-maker of Venice wrote some brilliant stuff. Pity we never see it performed.