The Author's Farce: The entire title of Fielding's play can be read in several ways, one method being that the puppet-show, The Pleasures of the Town, is the author's farce--that is, both Fielding's and Luckless'. Fielding's use of the term farce is particularly important, because the word consciously places the action of the play within a generic system in definitional flux. In 1730, when this play was first performed, farce was a genre comprising a wide array of other forms of entertainment considered 'vulgar' by the cultured literary élite but wildly popular with the theatre-going public--puppet-shows (like Luckless' Pleasures of the Town), pantomimicry, tumbling, juggling, posture-making, and other such entertainments. In its guise of ridiculously empty, unmeaning, and spectacular entertainment, farce was often used as a means of reacting defensively against what was seen as the 'foreign encroachment' of Italian opera and French theatre on the good old English stage of Shakespeare and Jonson. Generically instable, the farce was often more situational than systematic. Follow the links to a more detailed description of the farce.

In 1693, Poet Laureate and early farceur Nahum Tate wrote, "I have not yet seen any definition of Farce, and dare not be the first that ventures to define it. I know not by what Fate it happens (in common Notion), to be the most contemptible form of Drama" (qtd. in Farce, by Jessica Milner Davis [1978]).