Word: bentley
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...Bentley pointed out that by picturing an absurd situation, farce fulfills repressed wishes, although in disguise. "The contrast is between tone and context: the actor threatens murder in a playful tone, but the murderous wishes are true. Farce is a dialogue between aggressiveness and flippancy...
Delving into the dialectics of farce, Bentley stated that it unites wild fantasies with everyday, drab realities. Beneath the surface of gaiety lurks a violent disorder which effects the comic catharsis. Yet "the violence is essential only in the context of gentleness (as in Charlie Chaplin films), only as in the serious performance about the delicate human heart (as in Harpo Marx films...
...Bentley attacked the modern sanctimonious attitude toward marriage ("the family that prays together, stays together") which attributes the cause of America's "moral crisis" to jokes about adultery. Agreeing with Freud, he said that such jokes offer a safety valve to the "normal desire to destroy the family relationship, to desecrate the hearth...
...farce, as in dreams, we are permitted the outrage but spared the results." Thus by vicarious adultery committed through a farcical medium, Bentley maintained, marriages are saved because the consequent relief of inhibited desires is not accompanied by guilt-feelings...
Farce cannot function without this aggressiveness. Bentley stated. He agreed with Freud that innocent jokes do not make us laugh. "We want satire, obscenity, and attack." Thus farce is the only dramatic form in which an actor can lap his mother-in-law with humorous effects...