by Roger Foss
Some Like It Hot (1959) ‘Nobody’s perfect’, as the ending goes, and nobody can deny that Billy Wilder and A.L. Diamond created the perfect film farce.
What the Butler Saw (1969) A mad psychoanalyst instructs his new secretary to undress, triggering off a chain of inspired farcical invention and Orton-esque verve and verbosity. Joe Orton’s biographer John Lahr calls this play Orton’s farce masterpiece. ‘Orton made comedy out of the ideas behind the farce form. Where Orton’s earlier plays had lacked the scenic surprise to match the jolt of the lines, Orton was now using the stage with an inventiveness no modern comic playwright had dared.’ By the time it opened in 1969 stage censorship had been abolished but some of Orton’s bare-faced cheek was still edited out, including Winston Churchill’s phallus, which became a cigar.
Yes, Prime Minister (2010) In Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn’s clever stage adaptation of their hit TV series, Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey Appleby get themselves into a farcical frenzy dealing with the consequences of an oil crisis, political blackmail, an underage sex scandal and the media spinning out of their control.
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