Farce

Book excerpt: Farce elicits an immediate, elemental response from all age levels, cutting across national and intellectual boundaries. It dates back to people’s first attempts to scoff in public at whatever their neighbors cherished in private: social prestige, eccentricities, virtues that are vices, friendships, and enmities. Albert Bermel, teacher, writer, and translator of farce, takes readers on an instructive and hilarious voyage from the classical Greek stage through English Restoration and French farce, to the young Hollywood of Mack Sennett, Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, the other silent farceurs of the Jazz Age, and on to W. C. Fields, Mae West, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Monty Python—including other greats along the way like Hope and Crosby, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers.