May the Farce Be With You (8 page)

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.

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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