"In the best farce today we start with some absurd premise as to character or situation, but if the premises be once granted we move logically enough to the ending"
About this Quote
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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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