One only has to show their students The Germans episode to appreciate the comedy of Fawlty Towers. At the end of the day, Fawlty Towers is pure farce, with elements of slapstick thrown in for good measure. It is the contrast between competent and incompetent characters that creates the comedy. If all the characters in Fawlty Towers were incompetent, the comedy would not be fully realised. His character is highly physical, yet completely useless succeeding at the simplest of tasks (a body character). Manuel is the Commedia dell’arte character Arlecchino. Basil is the Commedia dell’Arte character Panatalone – a master with servants (employees), but he is incompetent at most of his duties. Sybil’s husband Basil (John Cleese) is the last person one would expect to run a hotel! By all accounts he does not belong in the drama. Sybil on the other hand, is competent at her job as part owner and manager, but her flaw is her laziness. Some farces are a mix of characters that rightly belong in the drama, and others who do not. In the 1970s television show Fawlty Towers, the maid Polly is a hardworking and responsible employee of the seaside hotel. Then get students to come up with their own contemporary examples of slapstick characters, television shows and films.įarce is a form of comedy that has ridiculous plots and preposterous events at its core. YouTube key scenes from the films of The Marx Bros, The Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy. Slapstick characters, however, should be kept simple, stereotyped and even caricatured for comic effect. There is little skill needed in the script writing, but the plots can often involve a complex web of events. When characters get hurt on stage in a slapstick routine, the audience laughs. Slapstick’s origins lie in the Commedia dell’Arte and its humour centres on its physicality and violence. Characters can slip on items on the ground, trip over low-lying props, walk into into unseen objects, accidentally run into characters, be hit by moving objects held by other performers, and sit on chairs removed beneath them for another purpose. Slapstick is a form of low comedy and is largely physical in nature.
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