Farce is a seasoned mixture of chopped ingredients that chefs stuff into other things—things like chickens, fish, or even ravioli. Farce is also known as stuffing, dressing, or forcemeat. Etymologists once believed that farce was a corruption of the word force in forcemeat, but in fact the opposite is true: farce comes from the Latin word farcire, meaning to stuff, and was corrupted to force on the assumption that a cook must force it in. Farce, in the sense of a brief, slapstick comedy also comes from the Latin farcire. In the fourteenth century, extra chants, known asfarsa, were sometimes “stuffed” into the usual liturgy of the church; in the sixteenth century, this liturgical term was borrowed by dramatists, who changed the spelling to farce, to refer to short, zany impromptu plays “stuffed” between the main pieces in a performance. Thus, the farce we eat and the farce we laugh at have the same linguistic origin.