ABSTRACT
For general reading on the subject of farce, Eric Bentley’s essay on “The Psychology of Farce” (in “Let’s Get a Divorce!” And Other Plays, N.Y., 1958) and Leo Hughes” A Century of English Farce (Princeton, N.J., 1956) are important, and Bentley’s The Life of the Drama (N.Y., 1964) includes a chapter on farce (pp.219–56) which expands on his earlier essay. Walter Kerr’s Tragedy and Comedy (N.Y., 1967) also provides some interesting insights into the spirit of farce (although he prefers to designate the genre as “low comedy”). The Freudian approach in Morton Gurewitch’s Comedy: the Irrational Vision is highly over-simplified. Readers interested in Freud’s analysis of joking would do better to turn to Freud himself, in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (trans. James Strachey, London, 1960); or to a paper by Paul Kline, “The Psychoanalytic Theory of Humour and Laughter,” in It’s a Funny Thing, Humour (ed. A.J. Chapman and H.C. Foot, Oxford, 1977), which briefly expounds Freudian theory on this subject.
