"The word cyberpunk was coined by writer Bruce Bethke, who wrote a story with that title in 1982. He derived the term from the words cybernetics, the science of replacing human functions with computerized ones, and punk, the cacophonous music and nihilistic sensibility that developed in the youth culture during the 1970s and ’80s. Science-fiction editor Gardner Dozois is generally credited with having popularized the term.
The roots of cyberpunk extend past Bethke’s tale to the technological fiction of the 1940s and ’50s, to the writings of Samuel R. Delany and others who took up themes of alienation in a high-tech future, and to the criticism of Bruce Sterling, who in the 1970s called for science fiction that addressed the social and scientific concerns of the day. Not until the publication of William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, however, did cyberpunk take off as a movement within the genre. Other members of the cyberpunk school include Sterling, John Shirley, and Rudy Rucker.
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farce, a comic dramatic piece that uses highly improbable situations, stereotyped characters, extravagant exaggeration, and violent horseplay. The term also refers to the class or form of drama made up of such compositions. Farce is generally regarded as intellectually and aesthetically inferior to comedy in its crude characterizations and implausible plots, but it has been sustained by its popularity in performance and has persisted throughout the Western world to the present.
Key People: David Garrick Tobias Smollett Gil Vicente Sir Arthur Wing Pinero P.G. Wodehouse
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Antecedents of farce are found in ancient Greek and Roman theatre, both in the comedies of Aristophanes and Plautus and in the popular native Italian fabula Atellana, entertainments in which the actors played stock character types—such as glutton, graybeard, and clown—who were caught in exaggerated situations.
It was in 15th-century France that the term farce was first used to describe the elements of clowning, acrobatics, caricature, and indecency found together within a single form of entertainment. Such pieces were initially bits of impromptu buffoonery inserted by actors into the texts of religious plays—hence the use of the Old French word farce, “stuffing.” Such works were afterward written independently, the most amusing of the extant texts being Maistre Pierre Pathelin (c. 1470). French farce spread quickly throughout Europe, notable examples being the interludes of John Heywood in 16th-century England. Shakespeare and Molière eventually came to use elements of farce in their comedies.
Farce continued throughout the 18th and 19th centuries; in France, Eugène-Marin Labiche’s Le Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851; An Italian Straw Hat) and Georges Feydeau’s La Puce à l’oreille (1907; A Flea in Her Ear) were notable successes. Farce also surfaced in music hall, vaudeville, and boulevard entertainments.
Farce survived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in such plays as Charley’s Aunt (1892) by Brandon Thomas and found new expression in film comedies with Charlie Chaplin, the Keystone Kops, and the Marx Brothers. The farces presented at the Aldwych Theatre, London, between the world wars were enormously popular, and numerous successful television comedy shows attest to the durability of the form. Examples from the second half of the century are the Italian Dario Fo’s Morte accidentale di un anarchico (1974; Accidental Death of an Anarchist), Michael Frayn’s Noises Off (1982), and Alan Ayckbourn’s Communicating Doors (1995).
This article was most recently revised and updated by Richard Pallardy.
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