farce (n.)
A farce is a comedy of slammed doors and mistaken identity. Said of anything else, it is a thing that has stopped being serious. It comes from the Latin farcire, to stuff or cram. English borrowed it first in the fourteenth century, and it meant forcemeat: the stuffing itself.12
The theatre took the word from the kitchen. Phrases were stuffed into the fixed words of the liturgy at festivals, and the same word was then used for the comic business stuffed in among the scenes of a religious play.12
The stuffing grew into a form of its own. English borrowed the word a second time in the sixteenth century, and that time it meant the comedy.2
The trial was a farce.