It’s #FarcesFriday, and our director, Laura-Elizabeth Rice, is back with reflections on choosing to work with medieval French farces, and how we chose our plays.

Two memories:

I’m six years old, listening to a group of boys sitting around one’s school desk. One of them is using a hand under his armpit to make noises that mimic gas, and they’re laughing like it’s the funniest thing they’ve ever heard. And I find myself thinking, I can’t wait to be an adult, so people won’t find fart jokes funny anymore, because they aren’t! (Oh, the innocence of youth!)

I’m eighteen and in university, in a class that’s supposed to be on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but our professor has decided that, instead, we’re going to be focusing on the question of “what is comedy?” He’s a young, early-career lecturer; it’s painfully obvious that he’s anxious to spit out the silver spoon he was born with, and his way of doing this is to argue strenuously that slapstick is the only valid form of comedy, because if you like anything else, you’re being a snob. I don’t think slapstick is funny at all. I’ll spend the semester arguing that watching someone be injured or made to feel embarrassed isn’t amusing, and that I don’t think that inherently makes me stuck-up.

I’m sharing these memories because it’s deeply ironic that I, of all people, should be spending time working on farces, a genre that relies heavily on physical and/or bodily humour… and irony is often a foundational part of comedy. Moreover, it’s worth knowing a little bit of that background, to help explain why, of all the farces in all the theatre in all the world (or at least, in France!), we should have settled on Master Pierre Pathelin and The Washtub for our upcoming reading.

Medieval comedy isn’t absent from the English canon of dramatic literature, but it’s quite limited, and exists entirely within wider dramatic genre that aren’t focused on laughs. Joseph’s Trouble About Mary is pretty funny, because it’s a pragmatic look at a Biblical moment that is usually held in pure reverence. The Second Shepherds’ Play is a strange combination of comedic folk play married to the more standard Christmas story. Our old friend, Mankind, has much bawdy humour, but its purpose is to be held up as an example of what not to be. There just isn’t a vast body of secular comedy from medieval England that exists solely because people wanted a laugh. 

It’s different in France. There are hundreds of farces from medieval France. Unfortunately, the majority aren’t available in translation; if you don’t read French- and medieval French at that!- these plays remain largely a literal and metaphorical closed book. This is changing (most notably, several collections translated and adapted by Jody Enders, which I highly recommend as entertaining reading even if you have zero interest in putting a farce onstage), but a lot– the majority- of the enormous body of farce remains just out of reach. So while I knew that, in deciding to present a comedy, we would be looking past English borders, the language question meant limitation among riches.

That said… once you start reading what is available in English, you confront the challenge of translation that isn’t about language or even France vs. England, but about cultures across time. My undergraduate lecturer was correct that slapstick has indeed stood the test of chronology- medieval people would have understood those six year old boys!- but the line of what is acceptable has definitely shifted. It’s quite shocking to realise that a significant percentage of medieval comedy is about violence, particularly domestic. Imagine watching a “Punch & Judy” show but with actors instead of puppets; men and women may give as good as they get, but the violence is unrelenting. There are those who argue that it is so exaggerated that it becomes comic, because it’s completely unrealistic, but we still felt it was over the line where we felt comfortable. 

The Washtub is marital comedy, but it still works as comedy if one ignores or excises stage directions that indicate the couple being violent towards one another- that is a disposable “extra” that isn’t necessary dramatically. Even without that, there is physical comedy, and it follows the slapstick trope of exaggeration of physical events: it’s unlikely that a grown, fully conscious woman would drown by falling into even a large medieval washtub in her own home; all she has to do is stand up! Thus much of the comedy centres around the absence of injury that the audience appreciates, but the character doesn’t; the rest is clever one-upmanship between spouses, of the sort that is still a staple of television sitcoms.

Pierre Pathelin is probably the best-known medieval French farce- possibly the best-known medieval French play, full stop, and I suspect that one of the reasons this is true is because it almost totally lacks violence-as-humour, so it hasn’t turned the corner into being more offensive than funny. It pokes fun at lawyers (another tradition that has carried on!), at unearned pomposity, and the idea of the clever scoundrel getting away with one-upping those considered his “betters” still resonates. It also includes a twist at the end that reminds me that my university lecturer did make some good points: reversal of expectation can be one of the criteria for defining comedy. In Pathelin, everybody is trying to cheat everyone else, and virtually everyone has some comeuppance along the way. 

I suspect that the same thing that made me read these plays and say, I want to do this!, is the same thing that has made them the best known among a fairly obscure genre: their surprisingly delicate balance between the hyperbolic actions of slapstick, and the jokes that ask the audience to contribute some thought or knowledge. You can appreciate them for exactly what they lay out in front of you- isn’t a man bleating “Baaa” in a courtroom ridiculous?- or you can be entertained because you know something about law and what Pathelin is faking. Or both. Meet them where you are. The medieval French writers gave us plays which understood what neither a younger version of me, nor my university teacher, did: that “funny” needn’t have a hierarchy; there are only different, and complimentary, ways of making an audience laugh.