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Ch7: Farce and Satire
Background
• Farce is a simplified dramatic form
derived from comedy and the human
psychology that seeks out fun for fun’s
sake along with the fulfillment of socially
unacceptable fantasies.
• One critic called farce a “veritable
structure of absurdities”
• Farce best defined as a comedy of
situation
• Sees life as aggressive, mechanical, and
coincidental, and entertains us with
seemingly endless variations on a single
situation.
• The “psychology of farce,” as Eric Bently
called it, is that special opportunity for
the fulfillment of our unmentionable
wished without taking responsibility for
our actions or suffering the guilt.
Farce and comedy
• Because farce grows out of an improbable, absurd
situation, its principal characters are comedy’s
familiar types taken to extremes.
• Fools have frequented farce since Greek and Roman
comedy and the “masks” of the Italian commedia
dell’arte of the 15th century.
• Sir Toby Belch (Twelfth Night), Puck (A Mid-summer
Night’s Dream), Dogberry (Much Ado About Nothing),
and Launcelot Gobbo (The Merchant of Venice)
• They are monuments to human stupidity and
mischievousness, reminding us that the human race
has its fools and impostors.
Farce and Comedy
• Farce as a subform of comedy recklessly abandons us
in a fantasy world of violence (without harm),
adultery (without consequences), and brutality
(without risk).
• Our fatansies- call them imagined pranks permit
more primitive, antisocial impulses to express
themselves in ways that both our conscious and our
unconscious would habitually forbid.
• Like Freud’s interpretations of jokes, farce is a fantasy
of humor acting out on stage our impulses on the
one hand to pleasure and self-indulgence and on the
other hand to aggression and hostility.
Farce and Comedy
• Writers associated with the theater of the absurd,
such as Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett,
exploit the practical joke to comment on the
ridiculousness of lives lived in a universe without
meaning.
• Ionesco subtitled The Chairs, a “tragic farce”
• Notes and Counter Notes
• In the context of the existential, farce becomes a
means of facing up to a universe that has lost its
meaning and purpose.
Farce and comedy
• In one sense, farce is drama’s safety valve; it releases the
steam of our antisocial wishes(and fantasies) for revenge,
aggression, violence, disruption, and offense.
• Farce has also been part of some of the world’s great
comedies, including those of Shakespeare and Molière.
• Their rehearsal is a series of blunders and their performance
is an artistic disaster, but the bumpkins are received with
good humor and indulgence rather than punishment.
• Farce has it’s place in drama’s forms, for it’s one facet of
human psychology.
• Farce is not unrelated to satire, and vice versa. In almost all of
the world’s great comedies are to be found elements of both
farce and satire.
Satire and Society
• Satire is also a subform of comedy that exposes, criticizes, and
censors humanity’s vices and cruelties with humor, wit, irony,
and even cynicism.
• Its aim is corrective, through laughter and ridicule to hold
human greed, hypocrisy, and evil up for examination and
moral judgment.
• The good of society is the ultimate goal in the satirist’s attack
on human folly and vice.
• Molière Tartuffe and The Misanthrope
• Satir uses wit (sophisticates language) and exaggeration to
expose or attack evil and harmful foolishness
• Modern satire has its roots in Old Comedy and the satyr plays
of the early Greek festivals.
Satire and Society
• Satire’s linguistic origins are to be found in the Greek’s satyr
plays of the 15th century, which were written to accompany
the trgedies.
• The satyr play most often was a burlesque treatment of
mythology(often ridiculing the gods and heroes) in boisterous
action and dance accompanied by incident language and
gesture.
• Later comedies of Aristophanes that commented on
contemporary society, politics, and literature, satire has
always reflected a seriousness of purpose – to correct and
reform.
Satire and Society
• Then satire disappears and its sister form, farce, reverts to
domestic trifles. The great democracies of the western world
have always tolerated satire as a means of holding the
dramatic mirror up to social ills, public tyrants, governmental
abuse, corrupt politicians and have taken to heart the
carefully crafted solutions of play-wrights to society's ills and
political extremist.
• Discrimination – George C Wolfe’s The Colored Museum
• Environmental concerns – Mark Hollmann’s and Gres Kotis’
Urinetown: The Musical
• In The Colored Museum, George C Wolfe utilizes the techiques
of farce and moral scrutiny of satire in his examination of
African-American history and literature.
The Colored Museum
George C. Wolfe
Critical introduction to The Colored Museum
• With uncompromising wit and a frenetic style, Wolfe says the
unthinkable about the history and present-day contradictions
of African-Americans in the USA.
• The setting is an antiseptic modern museum displaying
exhibits of “colored” history, beginning with the slave trade
and ending with contemporary Harlem.
• As a farceur and satirist, he sets about annihilate the
audience’s politically correct responses and attitudes and set
them on a path for social reform.
• “celebrity slaveship” obey a “Fatsen Shackles” seat-belt sign
”suffer a few hundred years” in exchange for receiving a
“complex culture.”
Critical introduction to The Colored Museum
• Wolfe establishes the outrageous playfulness of traditional
farce with personal seriousness that theater is a place for
ideas and truths about society and human condition.
• The other exhibits comprise displays of contemporary AfricanAmericans torn between cultural legacy of oppression and
revolt and exigencies of lining in the present.
• A woman dressing for a date is traumatized when her two
wigs atop her makeup table come to alive to debate the
identity conflict they have represented in their owner’s life for
20 years.
Critical introduction to The Colored Museum
• A corporate type tries to throw the icons of his childhood into
a trash can along with his inner adolescent self dressed in late
sixties’ street style.
The Jackson Five
Eldridge Cleaver
(31 August 1935 - 1 May 1998)
Albums by Jimi Hendrix
Political campaign buttons of
Angela Davis
Critical introduction to The Colored Museum
• “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” a play within-theplay, in which Wolfe shatters the pretensions of black
acting styles along with generational conflicts of 1950s’
black-American drama in which families are preoccupied
with middle-class aspirations.
• The target is Lorraine Hansberry’s award-winning drama,
A Raisin in the Sun.
• The title comes from the poem "Harlem" (also known as
"A Dream Deferred") by Langston Hughes. The story is
based upon a black family's experiences in
the Washington Park Subdivision of Chicago's Woodlawn
neighborhood.
• A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by
a black woman to be produced on Broadway, as well as
the first play with a black director (Lloyd Richards) on
Broadway.
Critical introduction to The Colored Museum
• With farcical style and satirical wit, Wolfe has torn at the
fabric of racist America by revealing the cultural blind spots of
blacks and whites alike: the black millionaire basketball player,
soul food, sensitive family dramas, and performers.
• As music, other characters, and projected images rise up from
history around Topsy, Wolfe’s intentions becomes clear; while
the baggage of slavery cannot really be banished, we have
been liberated from the shackles of the past by Wolfe’s
fearless and sustained Freudian joke that has bypassed social
taboos and cultural censors
Critical introduction to The Colored Museum
• The exhibits in Wolfe’s “colored museum” stress that we are
our past, but our present-day awareness liberates us in to vital
selfhood.
• The vulnerability of black identity and African-American pride
to exploitation and even destruction by majority culture is the
basic statement of The Colored Museum.
• That’s a manifestation of a slave mentality. Because you’re still
obsessing about how the dominant culture is going to judge
you and I refuse to give anybody that kind of power over my
thought process and creativity.
About the Author
• George C. Wolfe was born in Frankfort, Kentucky, on September 23, 1954.
As an African American, he experienced segregation in Frankfort but
because of the close-knit black community, he hardly experienced much
difference in the cultures. The loving attention he received from his family
always assured him that he was extraordinary and special, not inferior to
the predominant white people in the city. It wasn’t until Wolfe was seven
that he first took racism head on. He was denied a ticket to see the Disney
film 101 Dalmations at a theater in his hometown. Wolfe attended an all
black private school, until his family moved him to an integrated high
school, in which he felt very isolated. He couldn’t seek happiness or
acceptance until he tried his hand at directing for his high school’s theatre
department. Wolfe would say that he was “obsessed with theatre” and it
showed on his face when he saw his first Broadway show, Hello Dolly!
Since that experience, George started writing his own plays. When he
graduated from high school, he furthered his education by attending
Kentucky State University, and later Pomona College in Claremont,
California, to study theatre.
About the Author
• At Pomona College, Wolfe wrote a number of plays and many went
on to theatre festivals to win awards. When he graduated in 1976,
he remained in California to teach theatre to inner city students,
and to produce his plays among these artists. His time in Los
Angeles taught him many life lessons that expanded his views
beyond the small town where he grew up. He learned about the
inner city conflicts among many peoples, including African
Americans, Hispanics, Asians and homosexuals. A few years later,
Wolfe packed up his life on the west coast and decided to give the
east coast a chance. He relocated to the New York City and he
taught theatre at City College and the Richard Allen Center for
Cultural Art. At the same time, he studied at New York University
and was granted his Master Degree in dramatic writing in 1983.
About the Author
• Wolfe’s musical debut off-Broadway, Paradise, was a
flop; he quickly got back on his feet when The Colored
Museum fell into the hands of the director of the New
York Shakespeare Festival, Joseph Papp. That summer,
The Colored Museum began its early run in the Public
Theater. Although the critics loved the show, many
patrons were offended by the controversial topics
expressed in the play. Wolfe won the Dramatists’
Guild’s Elizabeth Hull-Kate Warriner Award for the best
play dealing with social, religious or political topics.
Following the run of The Colored Museum, Director
Papp invited Wolfe to be the Public Theater’s resident
director.
Synopsis
• The Play
• The Colored Museum satirizes the black experience in
America in the 1980’s. Although the play is controversial, its
comedy is found through satirical, exaggerated images of
black life. The Colored Museum accentuates the extreme
stereotypes of blacks by splitting the show up into eleven
vignettes, or museum exhibits.
• The exhibits include: Git on Board, Cookin’ with Aunt Ethel,
The Photo Session, Soldier with a Secret, The Gospel
According to Miss Roj, The Hairpiece, The Last Mama-on
the-Couch Play, Symbiosis, Lala’s Opening, Permutations
and The Party.
Themes and Topics to Explore
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Racism
Social Recognition
Stereotypes
Storytelling
Class Distinction
Prejudice and Pain
Family Roles
Self Worth
Satire
The Characters
Miss Pat: “Git on Board”
Aunt Ethel: “Cookin’ with Aunt Ethel”
Guy: “The Photo Session”
Girl: “The Photo Session”
Junie: “A Soldier with a Secret”
Miss Roj: “The Gospel According to Miss
Roj”
Janine: “The Hairpiece”
LaWanda: “The Hairpiece”
Woman: “The Hairpiece”
Narrator: “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch
Play”
Mama: “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch
Play”
Son: “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play”
Lady in Plaid: “The Last Mama-on-theCouch Play”
Medea Jones: “The Last Mama-on-theCouch Play”
Man: “Symbiosis”
Kid: “Symbiosis”
Lala: “Lala’s Opening”
Admonia: “Lala’s Opening”
Normal Jean: “Permutations”
Topsy Washington: “The Party”
The Play
• Git on Board (p.287): We will be crossing the Atlantic at an
altitude that’s pretty high, so you must wear your shackles at
all times.
• A Soldier with a Secret(p.291): Pst, pst.
• The Gospel According to Miss Roj (P.293): You can’t get no job
• The Hairpiece (P.295):
– Janine: Miss hunny, please……
– Lawanda: Miss Made-in-Taiwan,
• The Last Mama-on the-Couch Play (P.295):
- Narrator: we are pleased…..
- Son: leave me alone, Medea (P.297)
The Play
• Symbiosis (p.300):
• KID: Yeah. Yeah. ………
• Man: The…Ice…Age…is…
• Lala’s Opening
• Permutations (p.304)
• Normal: My mama used to say…..
• The Party (p.305)
• Yes, child!.......South Africa
Performing The Colored Museum
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The play was performed without intermission
Village Voice “Obie” award for best new play
Very fabric of racist America
The revolt belongs not so much to Topsy but
to George C. Wolfe’s fearless humor and satire
that liberate but not fully banishes the
baggage of slavery, racism, and angst from
American culture.
Eric Bentley from “The Psychology of Farce”
• Farce, an extreme form of comedy in which laughter is raised
at the expense of probability, particularity by horseplay and
bodily assault.
• The function of “farcical” fantasies, in dreams or in plays, is
not as provocation but as compensation.
• The main point of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents is
pertinent here: when we buy civilization, at the price of
frustration, the frustrated impulses become a potential source
of trouble.
• Dreams are the commonest relief but are usually unpleasant.
• There are two wrong ways of playing the indirectness of farce;
the amateur way and the professional way.
• But in which one had no feeling of the inordinate aggression
of Wilde against Victorian civilization, if not against all
civilization.
David Savran’s Interview with George C. Wolfe (1998)
• Black people create this fantasy Africa that never existed.
• So to me that’s been the goal; to try as a human being not to
choose this quality over that quality, but to try to embrace all
of them.
• That’s so much what The Colored Museum was all about, “I’m
not what I was ten years ago or ten minutes ago, I’m all of that
and then some.”
• So I wrote The Colored Museum as a form of liberation and I
said ”Now I can write any play. ”
The First Production
• Rick M. Khan: executive director of The Colored Museum’s
world premier, and co-founder of the Crossroad Theatre
Company.
• Lee Kenneth Richardson: artistic director of The Colored
Museum’s world premier, and most recently film actor.
Richardson directed at the New York Shakespeare Festival
when the show first previewed.
Production History
• Premiered at the Crossroad Theatre Company
on March 26, 1986.
• Previewed at Joseph Papp’s New York
Shakespeare Festival on October 7, 1986
NKU’s Corbett Theatre
Directed by Brian Robertson
• From left, LaTonia Phipps, Derric
Harris, Inga Ballard, Timothy Ware,
Tiffany Jewel in The Colored
Museum. October 2, 2008
The Colored Museum by George C. Wolfe
Directed by Sheila Ramsey
Set by David Russell
Costumes by Katherine Mitchell
The Colored Museum Photo Gallery 2006-2007
University Theatre
• Gene Perry made musical contributions to Colored Museum both directed
by Dr. Floyd Gaffney of the University of California San Diego Department
of Theatre.
• During The Colored Museum, Gene was visible throughout the play
using Afro-Caribbean sounds. He opened the play with bomba and plena
rhythms
• The Colored Museum
1996 at Brown University
Macalester College Theater and Dance Department
Presents
“The Colored Museum” by George C. Wolfe
September 26, 27, 28, and October 2, 3, 4
San Jose States Department of RTVF presents "The
Colored Museum "
Revisiting farce and Satire
• Farce and satire have entertained theater
audiences for centuries. There are
elements of both found in most comedies
ranging from Ben Johnson’s Volpone to
Michael Frayn’s Noises Off.
• Volpone (Italian for "The Big Fox") is
a comedy by Ben Jonson first produced in
1606, drawing on elements of city
comedy, black comedy and animal fable.
• A merciless satire of greed and lust, it
remains Jonson's most-performed play,
and it is among the
finest Jacobean comedies.
Revisiting farce and satire
• Noises Off is a 1982 play by English
playwright Michael Frayn. The idea for it was
born in 1970, when Frayn was standing in the
wings watching a performance of Chinamen,
a farce that he had written for Lynn
Redgrave.
• According to the playwright, "It was funnier
from behind than in front and I thought that
one day I must write a farce from behind.“
• The prototype, a short-lived one-act play
entitled Exits, was written and performed in
1977. At the request of associate Michael
Codron, Frayn expanded the play into what
would become Noises Off.
Revisiting farce and satire
• Farce is a clever, physical variation on humorous activities
growing out of social situations.
• Farce has its serious side, expresses our darkest secrets and
fantasies.
• As Topsy Washinton sings optimistically of the “power in her
madness and in her colored contradictions,” she embodies the
fantasies and contradictions that farce best exemplifies in its
knock-about antics.
• Reexamination of African-American history and literature.
Revisiting farce and satire
• In modern times, farce and satire have achieved unlooked-for
complexities.
• Farce has expressed the endless variations on an absurd
existence without purpose or meaning, or it has taken on the
absurdities of the historical process, or it has tackled the icons
of the dominant popular culture to test ideas within a
theatrical form that permits variations on social history
without ham or reprisal.
• Tragicomedy is not a subform of comedy. Writers of
tragicomedy blend ideas, moods, and elements of tragedy
and comedy in the creation of a third mode of writing,
dominant for the second half of the 20th century.
Clips
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Directed By: AMINI J. COURTS
Starring: DOUG GOLDMAN As: MISS ROJ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQdkSQkaVVo
People's Theatre production. Orlando Fl
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzS9AK8vr3c
Dir. George C. Wolfe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kjzwukWUco