white-telephone farce
- noun
:
farsa de teléfono blanco
- The festival features a screening of a rare white-telephone farce from pre-war Italy.
Examples
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He specializes in directing white-telephone farces that evoke the glamour of a bygone era.
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Many Italian directors embraced white-telephone farces in the 1940s.
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Critics praised the film as a successful revival of the white-telephone farce genre.
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The film is a classic example of white-telephone farce.
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Critics praised the film as a successful revival of the white-telephone farce genre.
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He specializes in directing white-telephone farces that evoke the glamour of a bygone era.
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The festival features a screening of a rare white-telephone farce from pre-war Italy.
Synonyms
A light, elegant Italian film from the 1930s and 1940s about rich people's romantic and funny lives
Surface Forms
Morphology
white-telephone + farce
The components 'white-telephone' and 'farce' give a partial clue — a comedic work involving white telephones — but the specific historical/cultural sense (a 1930s–40s Italian genre signifying upper‑class settings) cannot be derived from the literal words alone. Because understanding the full genre meaning requires extra cultural knowledge about the white telephone motif, a B1 learner who only knows the constituent words would only partially guess the concept.
Etymology
White-telephone farce comes from old Italian films where a shiny white telephone was a sign of rich, modern homes. These light, silly comedies called a farce used that image, so the name now means 'a light comedy about rich people'.
