[— Karen Myers —]

Let’s talk about the comedy and farce narrative frameworks using a couple of concrete examples by masters of the genres. Apologies for length, but sometimes I feel the need to burrow in…

The definition of comedy comes to us from Aristotle, as a distinction from tragedy: tragedy imitates men who are better than the average and comedy men who are worse.

Comedy, from its ritual beginnings, has celebrated creative energy. The primitive revels out of which comedy arose frankly acknowledged man’s animal nature. It testifies to physical vitality, delight in life, and the will to go on living. Comedy is at its merriest, its most festive, when this rhythm of life can be affirmed within the civilized context of human society. In the absence of this sort of harmony between creatural instincts and the dictates of civilization, sundry strains and discontents arise, all bearing witness to the contradictory nature of humanity, which in the comic view is a radical dualism; efforts to follow the way of rational sobriety are forever being interrupted by the infirmities of the flesh. The duality that tragedy views as a fatal contradiction in the nature of things, comedy views as one more instance of the incongruous reality that everyone must live with as best they can.

Farce has precursors in the classical world, too (e.g., Aristophanes), but the fully-developed form (with its name) comes from the French theater. It was in 15th-century France that the term farce was first used to describe the elements of clowning, acrobatics, caricature, and indecency found together within a single form of entertainment. Such pieces were initially bits of impromptu buffoonery inserted by actors into the texts of religious plays—hence the use of the Old French word farce, “stuffing.”

How do these differ, practically?

Comedy is a dramatic work that makes people laugh. Some comedies aim only to create laughter whereas some aim to expose and criticize the vices and follies of the society while creating laughter. 

Farce is a type of comedy that is characterized by highly exaggerated and comic situations and crude and one-dimensional characterizations. It has no other aim than creating laughter. To achieve those aims it uses both parody and exaggerated characters.

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Let’s look at today’s exemplars — P. G. Woodhouse (Jeeves et alia) vs Poul Anderson‘s Hoka stories (continued by Gordon R Dickson).

Here are some bits of what P. G. Woodhouse had to say about his process… He wrote a great deal for the stage, and thus added to the normal complexities of a novel the recognition that actors needed to be on stage (in a scene) in certain expectable percentages and that comic situations needed to be carried in dialogue as much as in staging (the constraints of theatre).

• Before starting a book Wodehouse would write up to four hundred pages of notes bringing together an outline of the plot; he acknowledged that “It’s the plots that I find so hard to work out. It takes such a long time to work one out.” He always completed the plot before working on specific character actions.
  
• After he had completed his notes, he would draw up a fuller scenario of about thirty thousand words, which ensured plot holes were avoided, and allowed for the dialogue to begin to develop.
  
• Wodehouse believed that one of the factors that made his stories humorous was his view of life, and he stated that “If you take life fairly easily, then you take a humorous view of things. It’s probably because you were born that way.” He carried this view through into his writing, describing the approach as “making the thing a sort of musical comedy without music, and ignoring real life altogether”.
  
• When dealing with the dialogue in his novels, Wodehouse would consider the book’s characters as if they were actors in a play, ensuring that the main roles were kept suitably employed throughout the storyline, which must be strong: “If they aren’t in interesting situations, characters can’t be major characters, not even if you have the rest of the troop talk their heads off about them.”
  
• Many of Wodehouse’s parts were stereotypes, and he acknowledged that “a real character in one of my books sticks out like a sore thumb.”

Some of my own observations about Wodehouse’s work…

• Master-class world-building, and plot construction. Humor is more situational, based on character foibles and fickle-fate, than superficially referential/parodistic.
  
• Elevates a comic form to create an improbable but inexorable plot mechanism. Fate plans disaster, godlike Jeeves averts (often for aims of his own).
  
• Language is deftly used for character illustration

For contrast, here are some of my observations about the Hoka stories.

• The Hoka stories are entirely dependent on farce to carry their humor, and the driving force of each story is a parody of a famous literary work.
  
• Tight world-building is irrelevant. A loose overall situational structure for the protagonist’s career and family is sufficient background.
  
• Without prior knowledge of the work(s) being parodied, the stories lose their referential commentary. The reader must bring a background of specific knowledge.
  
• Parody ignores world building entirely. Takes a serious object of culture to distort/comment upon it for humorous effect.
  
• Language details are for local-plot parodistic effect — very much a short story set in a loose framework orientation.

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My reaction to the Hoka stories is a giggle / to PGW, it’s awed admiration.

The Anderson/Dickson stories exhibit the dexterity of a hail of situational bullets, but it’s all dependent on outside knowledge (like all parody).

For Wodehouse, the inevitability (via highly improbable mechanisms) of the plot structure in the self-contained immaculate world-building is mesmerizing. It’s like watching a Rube Goldberg mechanism in action.

I can’t shake my own demands for believable world-building (for some level of believable), and the Hoka-world violates that too much for my taste.

On the other hand, excellent linguistic or situational jokes can cover an awful lot of sins.

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What would result if the Hoka absorbed the Bertie & Jeeves corpus as a source for parody? (Is there a story where that ever happened?)

How do you think Terry Pratchett’s Discworld fits (or doesn’t) into this framework? I suspect that’s a different concept altogether — part parody, part excellent plot building, part whimsy (I am reminded of the casual mythological intrusions of James Branch Cabell).

Have you parodied anything where you depended on the reader’s knowledge?