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From Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, many of us are familiar with farce in its dramatic sense. However, when farce first appeared in English, it had to do with cookery, not comedy. In the 14th century, English adopted farce from Middle French with its original meaning of "forcemeat"—that is, a highly seasoned, minced meat or fish often served as a stuffing. In the 16th century, English imported the word again, this time to refer to a kind of knockabout comedy already popular in France. French farce had its origins in the 13th-century practice of "stuffing" Latin church texts with explanatory phrases. By the 15th century, a similar practice of inserting unscripted buffoonery into religious plays had arisen. Such farces—which included clowning, acrobatics, reversal of social roles, and indecency—soon developed into a distinct dramatic genre and spread rapidly in various forms throughout Europe.
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Examples of farce in a Sentence
Letters To The Editor, The Mercury News, 17 May 2024
Then an experiment designed to test the shuttle’s facility for orbital rendezvous, using a Mylar balloon inflated with gas, also ended in farce when the balloon launched but promptly exploded; meanwhile, the shuttle toilet—which had always been troublesome—stopped working altogether.
—Adam Higginbotham, Smithsonian Magazine, 8 May 2024
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“Farce.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/farce. Accessed 29 May. 2024.
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