Life & Wisdom Quote by George P. Baker

Farce gets mislabeled as chaos: pratfalls, door slams, a blizzard of coincidences. Baker is insisting on the opposite. The “absurd premise” is the admission ticket, not the method. Once the audience agrees to a slightly bent world - a mistaken identity, a too-thin disguise, a secret that can’t stay secret - the comedy has to run on rails. That’s why the best farce feels both ridiculous and inevitable: the laughter comes from watching logic do damage inside a pressure cooker of bad assumptions.

Baker’s word choice is quietly polemical. “If the premises be once granted” borrows the language of proof, treating farce as a kind of theorem: accept the initial axiom and the conclusion becomes unavoidable. Subtext: cheap farce is arbitrary, a pile of gags; good farce is disciplined craft. The writer’s job is not to keep inventing new nonsense, but to honor the original nonsense so faithfully that it self-propagates. Characters shouldn’t behave randomly; they should behave consistently enough that their consistency becomes the trap.

The context matters. Baker was a major drama teacher and critic in an era when theater was trying to professionalize its standards and defend “popular” forms against accusations of vulgarity. This line reads like a rebuttal to snobbery and to laziness at once: farce isn’t lesser because it’s implausible; it’s lesser only when it’s illogical. In that frame, the absurd is a starting point, not an excuse.