ke
the whole world a little better for your work."

CHAPTER XVIII

THE TREATMENT OF COMEDY

Let it be remembered that the lines of division between the several
sorts of comedy are not sharply defined, for one often overlaps the
other; nor is a rigid adherence to type insisted upon by either
playwright or public--for example, on the regular stage we have
farce-comedy, and other hybrids.

_1. Types of Humorous Plays Distinguished_

_Comedy_, strictly, is a lighter, more refined, type of humor than
farce. It deals with those amusing situations which do, or may, happen
every day, without the introduction of the extravagant and the
unnatural. True comedy is distinctly probable. Its humor is the humor
of reality, however laughable it may be. It may press humor to an
extreme, but that extreme must never strain our credulity.

_Farce_ is essentially extreme. It deals with the absurd, the
ridiculous, not with the physically impossible. Though not in itself
probable, all its actions proceed just as though the basis on which it
is worked out were probable.

To illustrate both types, we may recall an extremely humorous comedy
situation which was worked out by Miss May Irwin some years ago in
"The Swell Miss Fitzwell." One of the characters had conspired with a
physician to deceive the former's wife by pretending to break his leg.
As a matter of fact he tumbles down stairs with an awful clatter and
the leg is actually broken. The doctor comes in, according to the
scheme, and, not knowing that the leg is broken, begins to twist it
with fine professional vigor. The victim howls and protests that he is
in agony, but the doctor merely whispers in a cheerful aside, "Keep it
up, you are playing your part beautifully!" And so the play goes on.

All this might easily have happened in real life, and the audience is
tickled--not to see a man apparently suffer, but at the humor of the
biter being bit. The very incongruity is the foundation of the
humor--incongruity, mingled with surprise.

But farce would not be content with twisting the leg, it would go to
any absurd extreme imaginable. Suppose, for example, that the doctor's
twisting of the victim's leg should so enrage him that he would leap
upon the doctor and bite the torturer's leg in the manner of a dog.
The wife, coming in, might think that her husband had hydrophobia, and
a whole train of farcical results might follow. We have all seen
unnatural yet uproariously