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farce
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  • Chapter 31 — Tragedy Then Farce   (source)
    farce = a situation that is made to look like one thing, but is really another
  • After the POWs had passed, the Bird jumped down, ran ahead, and hopped onto another trough, shouting, striking his pose, and demanding salutes. Over and over he repeated the farce, driving the men on for miles.   (source)
    farce = ridiculous situation
  • It's a farce, man.   (source)
    farce = a ridiculous situation
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show 2 more with this conextual meaning
  • The next move was a little like a scene in a farce.   (source)
  • "I really believe," said he, "I could be fool enough at this moment to undertake any character that ever was written, from Shylock or Richard III down to the singing hero of a farce in his scarlet coat and cocked hat."   (source)
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  • If God on the Cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ.†   (source)
  • Chapman had become the public face defending the conviction, and he realized that he'd put his own credibility on the line by relying on the work of local investigators—work that was now revealed as almost farcically flawed.†   (source)
  • What a farce!†   (source)
  • The exchange rate is a farce, the price of carrots indefensible, duplicity lives everywhere.†   (source)
  • They dug trenches, secured supply lines and were sent out on night exercises that were farcical for the infantrymen because the purpose was never explained and there was a shortage of weapons.†   (source)
  • Some naughty, nameless waitress, out of a white-aprons-and-feather-dusters porno farce.†   (source)
  • "What a farce this is," one of the fat yellow birds grumbles as he stuffs his face.†   (source)
  • "The mummer's farce has gone on long enough for today."†   (source)
  • It was only a farce.†   (source)
  • My sight is veiled; I cannot tell if this be tragedy or farce, for the elements of both are here…… However it may be, my station is unchanged, and I ….†   (source)
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  • A proper dress would have sunk her to the ocean floor in heavy seas and made our story a farce.†   (source)
  • I wouldn't miss this little comic farce for a month in the orgasm baths on Shote.†   (source)
  • But "family" is a farce among the propertyless and disenfranchised.†   (source)
  • She defended herself with a pair of gardening shears that she had hidden in her bodice, and six men were needed to put her in the strait jacket while the crowd jammed into the Plaza of the Customhouse applauded and whistled with glee in the belief that the bloody capture was one of many Carnival farces.†   (source)
  • I wondered how I'd ever fallen for their human farce.†   (source)
  • It wasn't that I hated Boca, I told them; it was just that I loved high farce.†   (source)
  • We were maids and farmers, handymen and washerwomen, and anything higher that we aspired to was farcical and presumptuous.†   (source)
  • Their relationship had developed into a ridiculous bedroom farce, in which Blomkvist had to tiptoe around trying to get to her house unnoticed.†   (source)
  • Saying, in effect, what is all this legal farce, why haven't those sonsabitches Smith and Hickock got it in the neck, how come those murdering sonsabitches are still eating up the taxpayers' money?†   (source)
  • I had still not admitted to anything other than the name David Motsamayi, and Truter said to me, "Nelson, why do you keep up this farce?†   (source)
  • If you ask me, the whole business of deportation is just a farce.†   (source)
  • We can maybe pitch it to the old man as the final scene in the Red Razberry Zingers farce.†   (source)
  • "My Selection wasn't a farce, but it wasn't that far off.†   (source)
  • I was so disgusted with the BOP's farcical prerelease program that I just shut my eyes and waited for it to be over.†   (source)
  • The music became suspenseful now, a series of diminished chords, perhaps a scary moment pending—and sure enough the orchestra reached the stage apron and dropped rather dramatically into the pit and then completely out of sight, elevatored down like so many geeks in tuxedos, a maneuver of a certain farcical bravado, greeted with cheers.†   (source)
  • Sportswriters argued that the rich event was a farce arranged to pad Seabiscuit's bankroll.†   (source)
  • I knew the whole thing was a farce, that Ridley was bringing this party to life with every suggestive lick, and Lena knew it, too.†   (source)
  • He went to Northwestern University film school two summers ago, when he was just sixteen, and has written a play called Phallacy, which he calls "a sexual farce."†   (source)
  • Later, the retrospectoscope, that handy tool of the wags and pundits, the conveners of the farce we call M&M—morbidity and mortality conference—will pronounce your decision right or wrong.†   (source)
  • Separate but equal was a cruel farce.†   (source)
  • And, despite the farce that ended my attempt to say "yes" to the Brotherhood, I'm still plagued by his deathbed advice ….†   (source)
  • To Washington it had been an obligatory farce.†   (source)
  • Because it all sounds like a classic French farce.†   (source)
  • What a farce it was.†   (source)
  • "A farce," Eugenides suggested, and the magus winced.†   (source)
  • And despite this farce of an overture, Prusias has no intention of sparing Rowan.†   (source)
  • "It was reprised in Shakespeare, in a farcical way," my dad told her.†   (source)
  • Nobody wants to sell the chocolates in the first place and it's turned into a kind of farce in some classes.†   (source)
  • "I wanted to witness the farce," he said.†   (source)
  • Her gloves are a farce.†   (source)
  • Inside the theater, rehearsals are under way for a one-night-only performance of the farce Our American Cousin.†   (source)
  • Dendybar suddenly grew tired of the farce.†   (source)
  • Somebody objected to use of word "Luna" and still more to "Luna Free State"—it was "the Moon," Earth's Moon, a satellite of Earth and property of Federated Nations, just as Antarctica was—and these proceedings were a farce.†   (source)
  • I mean it's all the most incredible farce.†   (source)
  • "Frankly," the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said, "it's becoming a huge farce.†   (source)
  • Then he arose, dressed in his finest clothing, and spent the evening watching a wretched farce by a fifth-rate company, the finest that poor Niagara could get from Mother France.†   (source)
  • When I finished I read it over and realized it was a farce.†   (source)
  • What a farce!†   (source)
  • Then my great drama, directed brilliantly for a time, lapsed into farce.†   (source)
  • "The fools tried to kill his son, and what's worse, they made a mummer's farce of it.†   (source)
  • "Then she still plans to go through with this mummer's farce?"†   (source)
  • The prince laughed, as he always laughed when his bodyguard did this mummer's farce.†   (source)
  • "We both know your wedding was a mummer's farce.†   (source)
  • Why not end this farce now and spare us both?†   (source)
  • If that is your wish, say so, and I will end this farce.†   (source)
  • She turned back as he reached for his coins, intending to put an end to this mummer's farce.†   (source)
  • It was a mistake, even a touch farcical, awkward for both of them.†   (source)
  • The north remembers, and the mummer's farce is almost done.†   (source)
  • "The farce is over, old friend," he said to Colonel Gerineldo Marquez.†   (source)
  • "Has the Crow's Eye agreed to attend this holy farce and abide by its decision?"†   (source)
  • After this farce of a trial, execution will almost come as a relief.†   (source)
  • He played out that mummer's farce in the Great Hall so as not to shame you before your own people.†   (source)
  • I ask again, why must we play out this mummer's farce?†   (source)
  • "I promise you, this mummer's farce of a siege would not have amused him.†   (source)
  • "Let us have done with this mummer's farce."†   (source)
  • Do you have any more to say to me, Onion Knight, or can we put an end to this mummer's farce?†   (source)
  • So why not send the northmen forth to battle Stannis before the farce unraveled?†   (source)
  • All they got for it was farce and tragedy.†   (source)
  • By the time this mummer's farce was done they would know they had but one true queen.†   (source)
  • That was why Roose Bolton had clothed him as a lord again, to play his part in this mummer's farce.†   (source)
  • The queen was angry to think that she had kept her small council waiting for this mummer's farce.†   (source)
  • Why did I ever allow myself to be talked into this farce?†   (source)
  • The Yunkai'i played us a mummer's farce, with noble Hizdahr as chief mummer.†   (source)
  • One of his plays, a lighthearted political farce, is going to be produced in the fall at a small theater near Hotel de Ville in Paris, and he has already been commissioned to write another.†   (source)
  • Neither of these things had much to do with the fact that he'd been murdered, but I did my utmost, especially with the morals; and it's a fact that those four people kept popping in and out of one another's beds like a French farce, so that it was hard to keep it straight who was sleeping where.†   (source)
  • She gave a farcical hue to her weeks of boredom and solitude, of how she had come to be with the family, and make amends for being away, and had found her parents and sister absent in their different ways.†   (source)
  • What began as a comic-serious homage to the ghost of John Keats became my last reason for existence, an epic tour de force in an age of mediocre farce.†   (source)
  • "There was a fat one with rings and a forked yellow beard, and another in mail and a steel cap, and the fat one said they had to delay but the other one told him he couldn't keep juggling and the wolf and the lion were going to eat each other and it was a mummer's farce."†   (source)
  • It was farcical.†   (source)
  • When Brom first saw Saphira, I remember he said something to himself about being unsure whether 'this' was a farce or a tragedy.†   (source)
  • A bloody farce.†   (source)
  • It distances the entire thing, reduces it to a farce or prank, in which I have no involvement aside from mockery.†   (source)
  • When you told those reporters that you came to New York to witness the farce, which farce did you mean?†   (source)
  • Word has come from James Ford, the manager of Ford's Theatre, that he is staging the wildly popular farce Our American Cousin.†   (source)
  • On the evening of January 8, uniformed officers and their ladies packed Faneuil Hall for what was expected to be the event of the season, a performance of a musical farce said also to have been written by Burgoyne.†   (source)
  • "Shhh, be quiet," I said, "that's no way to act when you're being —" and she raised her lips for more and I kissed her again and calmed her and she dozed off and I decided again to end the farce.†   (source)
  • He was wondering whether it was a farce or a tragedy that Morzan's youngest son should be the one to take up the Riders' mantle!†   (source)
  • First, as usual, he would call the personal injury lawyer they'd hired to look after the convoluted legal farce Grace's accident seemed destined to become.†   (source)
  • But it all seemed like a farce.†   (source)
  • It was Knowlton at Bunker Hill who, with Colonel John Stark, had famously held the rail fence in the face of the oncoming British lines, and Knowlton who, during the siege of Boston, had led the night attack on Charlestown that so upset the British officer's production of the Burgoyne farce The Blockade at Faneuil Hall.†   (source)
  • He rolled over on his back and lay with his hands crossed under his head, looking up as if he were watching the scenes of a movie farce unrolling on the ceiling.†   (source)
  • Boston having no theater, Faneuil Hall, sacred to Boston patriots as "the cradle of liberty," was converted on General Howe's wish into a "very elegant playhouse" for amateur productions of Shakespeare and original farces, with officers and favored Loyalists taking parts.†   (source)
  • Aureliano, Jose did not realize how much ground he had lost on, the night he could no longer bear the farce of indifference and went back to Amaranta's room.†   (source)
  • "A few more hours and this farce is done, Mother," he said in a low voice, as the Greatjon sang of the maid with honey in her hair.†   (source)
  • Incredulously, he realized what it was that had been expected of him: he, the victim, chained, bound, gagged and left with no recourse save to bribery, had been expected to believe that the farce he had purchased was a process of law, that the edicts enslaving him had moral validity, that he was guilty of corrupting the integrity of the guardians of justice, and that the blame was his, not theirs.†   (source)
  • The numerous red ballots that appeared is the box and that were attributed by Don Apolinar Moscote to the curiosity that came from youth were part of his plan: he made his disciples vote in order to show them that elections were a farce.†   (source)
  • After his mummer's farce of a trial, his sweet sister and loving father might prefer to dispose of him quietly, rather than risk a public execution.†   (source)
  • And despite what he'd told Bronn, going up against Ser Gregor Clegane in his own person would be a bigger farce than Joffrey's jousting dwarfs.†   (source)
  • "You know better than I," he said, "that all courts-martial are farces and that you're really paying for the crimes of other people, because this time we're going to win the war at any price.†   (source)
  • This is more absurd than a mummer's farce, me standing vigil for a father I helped to slay, sending men forth to capture the brother I helped to free ….†   (source)
  • The whole pageant that Lady Melisandre had orchestrated beyond the Wall suddenly seemed as empty as a mummer's farce.†   (source)
  • They have boats instead of horses, and their mummers play out written stories instead of just making up the usual stupid farces.†   (source)
  • The rancor I showed you in the Merman's Court was a mummer's farce put on to please our friends of Frey."†   (source)
  • Quill, the sad-eyed little man who made up all the bawdy farces for the Ship, offered to teach her how a woman kisses, but Tagganaro smacked him with a codfish and put an end to that.†   (source)
  • First that dirty crack about rich kids — a typical sneer of those who haven't got it — and now this farce.†   (source)
  • He kept walking up and down the room with his pipe—people always listened when he spoke—and he begun to say things such as 'Nuremberg is a farce, these hangings are a farce.†   (source)
  • The delightful room, the unexpected and farcical costumery, the beer, Nathan's demonstrative warmth and eagerness to make amends, Sophie's calamitous effect on my heart—all these had wiped out my will power.†   (source)
  • The audiences come for the prose farces.†   (source)
  • Determined to end the farce, I cornered Young and demanded to know who had given him authority.†   (source)
  • This farce is worth no more formal celebration.†   (source)
  • You'll be able to leave the farce of reality behind you directly.†   (source)
  • The farce has been going on for centuries and men still fall for it.†   (source)
  • The lie we lived, she and I. The shabby, sordid farce we played together.†   (source)
  • In fact, there is a deliberate playing of the farce!†   (source)
  • Our marriage was a farce from the very first.†   (source)
  • Bitterly he regrets permitting himself to play the farce with Hercule Poirot!†   (source)
  • …hair, something in a tongue which not even the girls themselves understand anymore, maybe not even the crone herself, rooted in nothing of economics for her or for any possible progeny since the very fact that we acquiesced, suffered the farce, was her proof and assurance of that which the ceremony itself could never enforce; vesting no new rights in anyone, denying to none the old—a ritual as meaningless as that of college boys in secret rooms at night, even to the same archaic…†   (source)
  • This little-farce-it must cease.†   (source)
  • Farces,—that's what they are!†   (source)
  • The farce was repeated all over again.†   (source)
  • "The money's no farce.†   (source)
  • To realize that the whole thing was a farce was depressing and I didn't know whether to be annoyed with Margie or sorry for her.†   (source)
  • Farce.†   (source)
  • Camila could only assume that the Marquesa, out of a sort of fantastic magnanimity, was playing the farce of not having noticed it.†   (source)
  • But he said, "Why, it's a farce!"†   (source)
  • Gauze-winders, hotel workers on strike, errors like my illusion about her sister, that farce of being taken for Mrs. Renling's gigolo, all that Thea had herself done meanwhile, these were entirely "out there.†   (source)
  • They only put on the Old Comedy twice a week; all the other nights there are these new farces in prose.†   (source)
  • …situated; they were classified, too, in grades of luck and wisdom, darkness by birth or vexations, power over or subjection to wives, women, sons and daughters, grades of disfigurement; or by the roles they played in comedies, tragedies, sex farces; whether they screwed or were screwed, whether they themselves did the manipulating or were roughly handled, tugged, and bobbled by their fates; their frauds, their smart bankruptcies, the fires they had set; what were their prospects of…†   (source)
  • We have played the farce long enough.†   (source)
  • It was a relief when the farce of the meal was over, and I heard Maxim go out on to the drive and start up the car.†   (source)
  • He shook his head with farcical gravity.†   (source)
  • Do so; this trial is a farce, I am going.†   (source)
  • Oh, this is farcical—a child, not more than fifteen.†   (source)
  • The pretence that women do not take the initiative is part of the farce.†   (source)
  • Tragedy had dwindled, the farce had begun.†   (source)
  • The scene must have been highly farcical.†   (source)
  • "The Hole in the Ground," said Drouet, mentioning the popular farce of the time.†   (source)
  • That huntin', Miss Majesty, petered out into what was only a farce.†   (source)
  • We sup, but later on we must return, For a rehearsal of to-morrow's farce.†   (source)
  • The twenty real notes were gone and had been replaced by twenty notes, of the "Bank of St. Farce"!†   (source)
  • I'm not accustomed to such farces—your man must remember he's not now in America.†   (source)
  • "Why," he cries, "if this be not a farcical adventure!†   (source)
  • Duane knew intuitively, before a chance remark gave him proof, that this court was a sham, a farce.†   (source)
  • You tell me my baby is black—that's farcical, that's very cheap.†   (source)
  • So I pulled out the farce and left the tragedy.†   (source)
  • A general pause ensued, and I began to hope that the farce was at an end.†   (source)
  • FAUST If thou therewith art fully satisfied, So let us by the farce abide.†   (source)
  • He ranges boldly from high comedy to farce.†   (source)
  • It was for her sake I went through that farce.†   (source)
  • Take the farce of Schleswig-Holstein….†   (source)
  • You play a farce, which I merely laugh at.†   (source)
  • Well, there are times when one would like to hang the whole human race and finish the farce.†   (source)
  • In this year of 1817 four young Parisians arranged "a fine farce."†   (source)
  • "Can these rascals continue their farce?" asked the bailiff.†   (source)
  • "An unseemly farce which I foresaw when I came here!" cried Dmitri indignantly.†   (source)
  • The defect turned out to be the one already spoken of—two stories in one, a farce and a tragedy.†   (source)
  • Here we are face to face; what's the use of going on keeping up a farce to each other?†   (source)
  • Gillenorman, minister!' that would be a farce.†   (source)
  • "Well!" she exclaimed, "it's a very pretty farce, all the same."†   (source)
  • "It's a strange thing a sensible man should care to play such a farce!"†   (source)
  • Ten months had elapsed since the "pretty farce."†   (source)
  • Its gayety is of the thunder and its farce holds a sceptre.†   (source)
  • "Mabeuf!" thought Gavroche, "that name is a perfect farce."†   (source)
  • "What a farce this is!" repeated Fauchelevent in consternation.†   (source)
  • "Mother Plutarque!" thought Gavroche, "another farcical name."†   (source)
  • Carol moaned, "Oh, but Vida dear, do forgive me but this farce——Now what I'd like us to give is something distinguished.†   (source)
  • And in Anderson's single greatest story, "The Egg," which appeared a few years after Winesburg, Ohio, he succeeded in bringing together a surface of farce with an undertone of tragedy.†   (source)
  • But only a couple of minutes later, when they had reached the park, Aglaya suddenly remarked, in her usual calm, indifferent voice: "I wanted to see how the farce would end."†   (source)
  • What is this farce?†   (source)
  • "It's a farce—a crazy farce," he repeated, his eyes fixed on the long vista of the room reflected in the blotched glass between the windows.†   (source)
  • Every day the coast looked the same, as though we had not moved; but we passed various places—trading places—with names like Gran' Bassam Little Popo, names that seemed to belong to some sordid farce acted in front of a sinister backcloth.†   (source)
  • Stephen, though in deference to his reputation for essay writing he had been elected secretary to the gymnasium, had had no part in the first section of the programme but in the play which formed the second section he had the chief part, that of a farcical pedagogue.†   (source)
  • In its serious pursuit of variations on this standard procedure, nature had employed every conceivable farce and grotesquerie.†   (source)
  • It was literally teeming, stratified, with the shades of human groups, who had met there for tragedy, comedy, farce; real enactments of the intensest kind.†   (source)
  • The court was a farce.†   (source)
  • If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce.†   (source)
  • He was no prude and could laugh as well as anyone at the witty immorality of a farce at the Palais Royal, but here was nothing but filth.†   (source)
  • Even f she can't afford a maid, the modern devices of science make the care of her four-room apartment a farce.†   (source)
  • The boat was heavy; they pushed at the bow with no breath to spare for an encouraging word: but the turmoil of terror that had scattered their self-command like chaff before the wind, converted their desperate exertions into a bit of fooling, upon my word, fit for knockabout clowns in a farce.†   (source)
  • The recent one was a farce, as he knew.†   (source)
  • CECELIA: (In tremendously sophisticated accents) Oh, yes, coming out is such a farce nowadays, you know.†   (source)
  • Besides, my child, in this place, what our libertine friend here would call the farce of parental wisdom is dropped.†   (source)
  • The farcical yet melancholy event was the beginning of a serious illness for him; and he lay in his lonely bed in the pathetic state of mind of a middle-aged man who perceives at length that his life, intellectual and domestic, is tending to failure and gloom.†   (source)
  • She was listening to her host with that quiet smile which Philip knew; she had no vivacity of expression, and it required broad farce to excite her laughter; but Philip could see that she was interested and amused.†   (source)
  • Three months of the old life had shown her that for her it was empty, vain, farcical, without one redeeming feature.†   (source)
  • The Collector was irritated and muttered, "McBryde's an old woman"; but Mrs. Turton said, "Really, after Mohurram a show of force will do no harm; it's ridiculous to pretend they don't hate us; do give up that farce."†   (source)
  • They still belonged to the beginnings of time—had no inherited experience to teach them as it were), and of course, as long as there was a piece of paper written over in accordance with some farcical law or other made down the river, it didn't enter anybody's head to trouble how they would live.†   (source)
  • … CYRANO: Come all—the Doctor, Isabel, Leander, Come, for you shall add, in a motley swarm, The farce Italian to this Spanish drama!†   (source)
  • Is that the real tragedy, that I never shall know tragedy, never find anything but blustery complications that turn out to be a farce?†   (source)
  • It contained twenty Bank of St. Farce notes like those which had so much astounded them the month before.†   (source)
  • It was the sort of farce which is advertised in "school entertainment" catalogues as: Riproaring knock-out, 5 m. 3 f., time 2 hrs.†   (source)
  • We called at some more places with farcical names, where the merry dance of death and trade goes on in a still and earthy atmosphere as of an overheated catacomb; all along the formless coast bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature herself had tried to ward off intruders; in and out of rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the contorted mangroves, that seemed to writhe at us in the extremity of an impotent…†   (source)
  • You must admit that here Nature beats Comedy out of the field: the wildest hominist or feminist farce is insipid after the most commonplace "slice of life."†   (source)
  • It was truly the most open farce, and I wondered that the lawyer should care to keep it up; but, after all, it was quite in the taste of that age, when there were two parties in the state, and quiet persons, with no very high opinions of their own, sought out every cranny to avoid offence to either.†   (source)
  • Law was a farce in Fairdale.†   (source)
  • Law here has been a farce.†   (source)
  • He had risen and, despite the farcicality of Dr. Will Kennicott's bulgy trousers draped over his arm, he had the grace of a cat.†   (source)
  • …to be exceptionally capable of distinguishing between good and evil, follows his own instincts without regard to the common statute, or canon law; and therefore, whilst gaining the ardent sympathy of our rebellious instincts (which are flattered by the brilliancies with which Don Juan associates them) finds himself in mortal conflict with existing institutions, and defends himself by fraud and farce as unscrupulously as a farmer defends his crops by the same means against vermin.†   (source)
  • [1] Flash notes drawn on the "Bank of St. Farce" in France correspond with those drawn on the "Bank of Engraving" in England.†   (source)
  • She had felt young and dissipated, had thought rather well of her black and leaf-green suit, but as she watched them, thin of ankle, soft under the chin, seventeen or eighteen at most, smoking cigarettes with the correct ennui and talking of "bedroom farces" and their desire to "run up to New York and see something racy," she became old and rustic and plain, and desirous of retreating from these hard brilliant children to a life easier and more sympathetic.†   (source)
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