Farces are objects of the audience's vision, never subjects of it. These needs are supposedly met through diligence, hard work, and marriage. Yet in the farce they are met and satisfied by unabashed deceit, and the audience applauds the action. Most commentaries on farce accredit the truant nature of the genre to its carnival spirit. The farce is by nature a dramatic form in which the carnival reigns supreme, where for a brief moment the rules do not apply and the laws are not enforced.
Death takes a holiday.
It is significant that adults and children react in precisely the same way when witnessing a farce. The losers in the farces clearly exhibit primitive and prelogical thinking, but not infantile cognition. The spectators, who are normally restrained by reason and decorum, are instigated by the various techniques used in farce to mock the primitive actions of the victims as inappropriate even for infants, and the spectators exhibit their scorn in a truly infantile way, assuredly for Bakhtinian reasons of carnivalization, but more assuredly because farce is an instrument designed to permit humans to laugh at the most basic level in the most uninhibited way, as a child does. This could not be done without the essential ingredients of anticipation, security, complicity, and objectification of the victim. Lope de Rueda's pasos , as early and as rudimentary as they are, brilliantly exploit all these elements of farce in a truly ingenious manner worthy of admiration.