Life & Wisdom Quote by George P. Baker

Farce runs on a neat act of fraud: it borrows the surface logic of everyday life and then feeds it events that should collapse the whole structure. Baker’s line pinpoints the trick with surgical clarity. The improbable doesn’t arrive in farce as a neon sign that says “nonsense.” It arrives wearing the costume of normalcy, treated by the characters - and, crucially, by the stagecraft - as if it’s merely the next reasonable step. That insistence is where the comedy lives: not in randomness, but in the disciplined, deadpan refusal to admit reality has been violated.

The subtext is almost a manifesto for modern comic storytelling. Farce isn’t “anything can happen”; it’s “everything must be defended.” Doors slam, identities tangle, lies multiply, and each new impossibility demands an even more confident performance of plausibility. The audience gets the double pleasure of superiority (we see the absurdity) and suspense (we want to see how long the illusion can be maintained). Baker frames farce as an engine that converts social embarrassment into momentum: once a character commits to saving face, the impossible becomes not only possible but inevitable.

Context matters: Baker was a major theater scholar and teacher in an era when American drama was professionalizing and trying to justify itself as serious study. His definition quietly dignifies farce by describing its craft, not dismissing it as low comedy. It’s an argument that the genre’s “stupidity” is actually technique - a precise calibration of belief, denial, and speed.