Daily Inspiration Quote by John Mortimer

Mortimer’s line treats farce less like a “lighter” genre than a stress test for tragedy: the same stakes, the same human flaws, just spun so fast the audience laughs instead of recoils. “A thousand revolutions per minute” is mechanical language, the sound of an engine redlining. It suggests that farce isn’t the opposite of seriousness; it’s seriousness put through a centrifuge until dignity, rationality, and decorum fly off.

The intent is slyly corrective. People talk about farce as if it’s disposable entertainment - doors slamming, trousers dropping, misunderstandings multiplying. Mortimer, a dramatist’s novelist with a barrister’s ear for how language collapses under pressure, argues that these gags are built from tragic materials: jealousy, shame, social exposure, the terror of being found out. Speed is the alchemy. Slow it down and you get cruelty, consequence, and the ache of inevitability; accelerate it and you get chaos that’s survivable because it never lets you sit with the pain.

Subtext: modern life runs at farcical velocity, and our coping mechanism is to treat catastrophe as comedy. The faster the escalation, the less time we have for moral accounting, which is why farce often feels like a critique of the very societies that consume it: status-obsessed, rule-bound, one misstep away from humiliation.

Contextually, Mortimer came up in a British tradition where class manners are both armor and trap, and where courtroom and stage share a taste for timing. In that world, laughter isn’t denial; it’s recognition at high speed.