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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.
Farce has always been relegated to the lowest rung of the ladder of dramatic genres. Distinctions between farce and more literary comic forms remain clouded, even in the light of contemporary efforts to rehabilitate this type of comedy. Is farce really nothing more than slapstick-the "putting out of candles, kicking down of tables, falling over joynt-stools," as Thomas Shadwell characterized it in the seventeenth century? Or was his contemporary, Nahum Tate correct when he declared triumphantly that "there are no rules to be prescribed for that sort of wit, no patterns to copy; and 'tis altogether the creature of imagination"? Davis shows farce to be an essential component in both the comedic and tragic traditions. Farce sets out to explore the territory of what makes farce distinct as a comic genre. Its lowly origins date back to the classic Graeco-Roman theatre; but when formal drama was reborn by the process of elaboration of ritual within the mediaeval Church, the French term "farce" became synonymous with a recognizable style of comic performance. Taking a wide range of farces from the briefest and most basic of fair-ground mountebank performances to fully-fledged five-act structures from the late nineteenth century, the book reveals the patterns of comic plot and counter-plot that are common to all. The result is a novel classification of farce-plots, which serves to clarify the differences between farce and more literary comic forms and to show how quickly farce can shade into other styles of humor. The key is a careful balance between a revolt against order and propriety, and a kind of Realpolitik which ultimately restores the social conventions under attack. A complex array of devices in such things as framing, plot, characterization, timing and acting style maintain the delicate balance. Contemporary examples from the London stage bring the discussion u
Surveying the artistic and cultural scene in the era of Trump In a world where truth is cast in doubt and shame has gone missing, what are artists and critics on the left to do? How to demystify a political order that laughs away its own contradictions? How to mock leaders who thrive on the absurd? And why, in any event, offer more outrage to a media economy that feeds on the same? Such questions are grist to the mill of Hal Foster, who, in What Comes after Farce?, delves into recent developments in art, criticism, and fiction under the current regime of war, surveillance, extreme inequality, and media disruption. Concerned first with the cultural politics of emergency since 9/11, including the use and abuse of trauma, conspiracy, and kitsch, he moves on to consider the neoliberal makeover of aesthetic forms and art institutions during the same period. A final section surveys signal transformations in art, film, and writing. Among the phenomena explored are machine vision (images produced by machines for other machines without a human interface), operational images (images that do not represent the world so much as intervene in it), and the algorithmic scripting of information that pervades our everyday lives. If all this sounds dire, it is. In many respects we look out on a world that has moved, not only politically but also technologically, beyond our control. Yet Foster also sees possibility in the current debacle: the possibility to pressure the cracks in this order, to turn emergency into change.
The book traces the rise and fall of Harvey Matusow, a wise-guy, professional informer-witness of the McCarthy era, whose dramatic recantation led to his own imprisonment but hastened the end of the era. No issue so possessed the nation in the first half of the 1950s as alleged Communist subversion in the United States. Communist Party member, an undercover FBI informer inside the Party, and then a leading witness for the government during the McCarthy era--until he recanted his testimony. His story illuminates a disturbing time in American history, one with renewed relevance today. Matusow was easily the most flamboyant of the professional ex-Communists, a celebrity informer who considered himself booked by Congressional committees not just to testify, but to entertain. He testified that Communists fostered loose sex, taught politicized Mother Goose rhymes to small children, and tried to infiltrate the Boy Scouts. He also named more than 200 people as Communists and was a prosecution witness in major criminal cases. transcripts, personal interviews, private papers, and other primary sources, most never before utilized, to describe the unusual role of ex-Communist informer-witnesses during the McCarthy era. The Justice Department kept several dozen political informers on the government's payroll to testify in hundreds of deportation, sedition, and contempt of Congress cases. Some informers achieved celebrity as the result of high-profile appearances at criminal trials and before Congressional committees. But as the era continued, instances of perjury began to appear. Harvey Matusow's sensational recantation in 1955 gave him his biggest audience yet. It led to the dissolution of the Justice Department's informer stable and ended the public's infatuation with the group. Matusow's unrepentant and at times vaudevillian appearances before the Senate red-hunting committee investigating his recantation, followed by his prosecution for perjury--for the recantation, not his original testimony--and prison sentence, mark the climax of Deadly Farce . McCarran, and Elizabeth Bentley, among many others, offers an inside, entertaining, and closely documented view of a largely untold part of McCarthy-era history. The columnist Murray Kempton described Matusow as a truly remarkable witness in the opera bouffe sense demanded by inquisitions of the 1950s.
A Dante/Beckett reduction of human struggle to its lowest common denominator. Michael Mirolla' author of The Formal Logic of Emotion and Berlin. One of the most original and thought - provoking stories I have ever read...true literary art...Not a word is wasted in this masterpiece. Yes' I call it that. I have read many classics' and I can tell you that The Divine Farce should be counted among them; the finest in American literature. Geek scribe Three strangers are condemned to live together in darkness' crushed together in a concrete stall so small that they can never sit down. Liquid food drips down from above. Waste drains through a grid on the floor. So begins one of the strangest' most surreal comments on the human experience' on love and hatred and the human ability to find good in any situation' no matter how difficult. Michael S. A. Graziano delights in the macabre and surreal' yet it is his optimism that lifts this little novel. Like The Love Song of Monkey' this book is deeply thought provoking' horrifying' and funny. Praise for The Love Song of Monkey; Imaginative' intelligent narrative. Twin ideas of forgiveness and mercy twist through this strange' moving' patiently wrought novel.
“A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both.”--James Madison, 1822 Mark Lloyd has crafted a complex and powerful assessment of the relationship between communication and democracy in the United States. In Prologue to a Farce, he argues that citizens’ political capabilities depend on broad public access to media technologies, but that the U.S. communications environment has become unfairly dominated by corporate interests. Drawing on a wealth of historical sources, Lloyd demonstrates that despite the persistent hope that a new technology (from the telegraph to the Internet) will rise to serve the needs of the republic, none has solved the fundamental problems created by corporate domination. After examining failed alternatives to the strong publicly owned communications model, such as antitrust regulation, the public trustee rules of the Federal Communications Commission, and the underfunded public broadcasting service, Lloyd argues that we must re-create a modern version of the Founder’s communications environment, and offers concrete strategies aimed at empowering citizens.
Looking into the face of our alleged ape ancestor, popular Christian apologist Hank Hanegraaff dissects and debunks the astonishingly weak arguments for the evolutionary theory, revealing it as nothing more than a "fairy tale for grown-ups." The author uses his own Memory Dynamics to make it easy for Christians to speak intelligently about evolution and speak persuasively about the Creator.
Farce has always been relegated to the lowest rung of the ladder of dramatic genres. Distinctions between farce and more literary comic forms remain clouded, even in the light of contemporary efforts to rehabilitate this type of comedy. Is farce really nothing more than slapstick-the "putting out of candles, kicking down of tables, falling over joynt-stools," as Thomas Shadwell characterized it in the seventeenth century? Or was his contemporary, Nahum Tate correct when he declared triumphantly that "there are no rules to be prescribed for that sort of wit, no patterns to copy; and 'tis altogether the creature of imagination"? Davis shows farce to be an essential component in both the comedic and tragic traditions. Farce sets out to explore the territory of what makes farce distinct as a comic genre. Its lowly origins date back to the classic Graeco-Roman theatre; but when formal drama was reborn by the process of elaboration of ritual within the mediaeval Church, the French term "farce" became synonymous with a recognizable style of comic performance. Taking a wide range of farces from the briefest and most basic of fair-ground mountebank performances to fully-fledged five-act structures from the late nineteenth century, the book reveals the patterns of comic plot and counter-plot that are common to all. The result is a novel classification of farce-plots, which serves to clarify the differences between farce and more literary comic forms and to show how quickly farce can shade into other styles of humor. The key is a careful balance between a revolt against order and propriety, and a kind of Realpolitik which ultimately restores the social conventions under attack. A complex array of devices in such things as framing, plot, characterization, timing and acting style maintain the delicate balance. Contemporary examples from the London stage bring the discussion u
Contents: The Nature of Farce; A.W. Pinero and the Court Farces; Ben Travers and the Aldwych Farces; Brian Rix and the Whitehall Farces; Post-Whitehall Farces; Joe Orton; Farce and Contemporary Drama: I; Farce and Contemporary Drama: II; Conclusion; ^R Appendix: a Chronological List of Plays; Notes; Bibliography; Index