"Farcical" is a word that seems to be everywhere – connected with everything from football clubs, to the Olympic Games, government policies and the state of the banking system. And it isn't just from over-enthusiastic headline writers. Theatre is also getting in on the act.

When John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps was published in 1915, it reportedly cheered up our boys fighting in the trenches during the first world war. At the moment, on (or near) the West End, there's not only an anarchic stage adaptation of Buchan's classic – a long-running hit – but One Man, Two Guvnors and The Ladykillers. Across the river Thames, The Comedy of Errors is packing them in at the National and Noises Off is at the Old Vic, while at Manchester's Royal Exchange, Told by an Idiot's version of You Can't Take It with You reanimates a comedy first seen in the depths of the great depression.

Perhaps our current economic decline isn't quite as bad as dying of trenchfoot while being shot at, but hey, it's January! We all need cheering up. And getting people laughing is clearly a shrewd financial move when all around them is darkness and woe. And I think it's about more than just raising a grin. The very structure of farce, with its preposterous scenarios and incomprehensible plots, echoes our own lives with uncanny exactness. The old rule may be that farce punctures respectability, but in today's world it seems to be mirroring it, as the real-life people in power endlessly slip on banana skins, from MPs' expenses to the pratfalls of the eurozone.

Perhaps there's a kind of solace, too, in these idiotic scenarios. In a hysterical world we can get a release from the emotional high jinks these hysterical plays give us. Even more than this, maybe there's a security to be found in the comic machinery of farce – even when it seems chaotic – that we're lacking in the wider machinery of society: the feeling of being safely in the hands of professionals.

Of course, one should always be wary of taking farce too seriously. But in a world of seemingly undisciplined mayhem, maybe it's the only answer. We are living in preposterous times; now, it seems, is the time for preposterous theatre.