The Farce de Maître Pathelin, the masterpiece of the medieval French comic theater, deploys all the genre's essential mechanisms: the clever trickster outwitting the merchant, the farcical courtroom scene, and the final reversal in which the trickster is himself tricked; Molière's comedy inherits the farce tradition directly, as visible in the physical comedy of Le Médecin malgré lui, where the repeated beatings, disguises, and verbal confusions derive from centuries of farcical performance conventions; The farce's social critique is embedded in its inversions: when a peasant outwits a lawyer, when a wife humiliates a bullying husband, the temporary comic inversion voices social resentments that official culture suppresses; A student analyzing a farce should attend to its stock characters: the foolish husband, the clever wife, the greedy merchant, the pompous judge, and the witty servant represent social types whose comic interactions implicitly critique the social structures they embody; The linguistic comedy of the farce, with its wordplay, misunderstandings, and code-switching between social registers, requires an audience attuned to the multiple meanings of words: the farce's comedy is fundamentally linguistic as well as physical; Rabelais's prose fiction draws deeply on the farcical tradition, his giants Gargantua and Pantagruel participating in adventures that echo farcical plot structures while his language exploits farcical wordplay with encyclopedic enthusiasm.