Community hub
Recent from talks
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
Comedy of menace
Comedy of menace is the body of plays written by David Campton, Nigel Dennis, N. F. Simpson, and Harold Pinter. The term was coined by drama critic Irving Wardle, who borrowed it from the subtitle of Campton's play The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace, in reviewing Pinter's and Campton's plays in Encore in 1958. (Campton's subtitle Comedy of Menace is a jocular play-on-words derived from comedy of manners—menace being manners pronounced with somewhat of an English accent.)
Citing Wardle's original publications in Encore magazine (1958), Susan Hollis Merritt points out that in "Comedy of Menace" Wardle "first applies this label to Pinter's work … describ[ing] Pinter as one of 'several playwrights who have been tentatively lumped together as the "non-naturalists" or "abstractionists" ' (28)". His article "Comedy of Menace," Merritt continues,
centers on The Birthday Party because it is the only play of Pinter's that Wardle had seen [and reviewed] at the time, yet he speculates on the basis of "descriptions of [Pinter's] other plays, 'The Room' and 'The Dumb Waiter', [that Pinter] is a writer dogged by one image—the womb" (33). Mentioning the acknowledged "literary influences" on Pinter's work—"Beckett, Kafka and American gangster films"—Wardle argues that " 'The Birthday Party' exemplifies the type of comic menace which gave rise to this article." (225)
In "Comedy of Menace", as Merritt observes, on the basis of his experience of The Birthday Party and others' accounts of the other two plays, Wardle proposes that "Comedy enables the committed agents and victims of destruction to come on and off duty; to joke about the situation while oiling a revolver; to display absurd or endearing features behind their masks of implacable resolution; to meet … in paper hats for a game of blind man's buff"; he suggests how "menace" in Pinter's plays "stands for something more substantial: destiny," and that destiny, "handled in this way—not as an austere exercise in classicism, but as an incurable disease which one forgets about most of the time and whose lethal reminders may take the form of a joke—is an apt dramatic motif for an age of conditioned behaviour in which orthodox man is a willing collaborator in his own destruction".
"Just two years later" (1960), however, Wardle retracted "Comedy of Menace" in his review of The Caretaker, stating: "On the strength of 'The Birthday Party' and the pair of one-acters, I rashly applied the phrase 'comedy of menace' to Pinter's writing. I now take it back".
After Wardle's retraction of comedy of menace as he had applied it to Pinter's writing, Pinter himself also occasionally disavowed it and questioned its relevance to his work (as he also did with his own offhand but apt statement that his plays are about "the weasel under the cocktail cabinet"). For example, in December 1971, in his interview with Pinter about Old Times, Mel Gussow recalled that "After The Homecoming [Pinter] said that [he] 'couldn't any longer stay in the room with this bunch of people who opened doors and came in and went out. Landscape and Silence [the two short poetic memory plays that were written between The Homecoming and Old Times] are in a very different form. There isn't any menace at all.' " Later, when Gussow asked Pinter to expand on his view that he had "tired" of "menace", Pinter added: "when I said that I was tired of menace, I was using a word that I didn't coin. I never thought of menace myself. It was called 'comedy of menace' quite a long time ago [1958]. I never stuck categories on myself, or on any of us [playwrights]. But if what I understand the word menace to mean is certain elements that I have employed in the past in the shape of a particular play, then I don't think it's worthy of much more exploration".
Despite Wardle's retraction of comedy of menace (and Pinter's later qualifications), Comedy of menace and comedies of menace caught on and have been prevalent since the late 1950s in advertisements and in critical accounts, notices, and reviews to describe Pinter's early plays and some of his later work as well. As Merritt points out, among other examples of critics' usage of this and similar categories of Pinter's work, after Gussow's 1971 "conversation" with Pinter, "Though he echoes Wardle's concept, Gussow seems to avoid using comedy of menace when reviewing the CSC Repertory Theatre's 1988 production of The Birthday Party. While still emphasizing Pinter's 'terrors' and the 'shiver beneath the laughter,' Gussow describes the play as "a play of intrigue, with an underlying motif of betrayal' … [and] [Bernard F.] Dukore calls the play 'a comedy (of menace or otherwise)'".
In discussing the first production of Pinter's first full-length play, The Birthday Party (1958), which followed his first play, The Room (1957), his authorised official biographer Michael Billington points out that Wardle "once excellently" described its setting (paraphrasing Wardle), as "a banal living-room [which] opens up to the horrors of modern history".
Hub AI
Comedy of menace AI simulator
(@Comedy of menace_simulator)
Comedy of menace
Comedy of menace is the body of plays written by David Campton, Nigel Dennis, N. F. Simpson, and Harold Pinter. The term was coined by drama critic Irving Wardle, who borrowed it from the subtitle of Campton's play The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace, in reviewing Pinter's and Campton's plays in Encore in 1958. (Campton's subtitle Comedy of Menace is a jocular play-on-words derived from comedy of manners—menace being manners pronounced with somewhat of an English accent.)
Citing Wardle's original publications in Encore magazine (1958), Susan Hollis Merritt points out that in "Comedy of Menace" Wardle "first applies this label to Pinter's work … describ[ing] Pinter as one of 'several playwrights who have been tentatively lumped together as the "non-naturalists" or "abstractionists" ' (28)". His article "Comedy of Menace," Merritt continues,
centers on The Birthday Party because it is the only play of Pinter's that Wardle had seen [and reviewed] at the time, yet he speculates on the basis of "descriptions of [Pinter's] other plays, 'The Room' and 'The Dumb Waiter', [that Pinter] is a writer dogged by one image—the womb" (33). Mentioning the acknowledged "literary influences" on Pinter's work—"Beckett, Kafka and American gangster films"—Wardle argues that " 'The Birthday Party' exemplifies the type of comic menace which gave rise to this article." (225)
In "Comedy of Menace", as Merritt observes, on the basis of his experience of The Birthday Party and others' accounts of the other two plays, Wardle proposes that "Comedy enables the committed agents and victims of destruction to come on and off duty; to joke about the situation while oiling a revolver; to display absurd or endearing features behind their masks of implacable resolution; to meet … in paper hats for a game of blind man's buff"; he suggests how "menace" in Pinter's plays "stands for something more substantial: destiny," and that destiny, "handled in this way—not as an austere exercise in classicism, but as an incurable disease which one forgets about most of the time and whose lethal reminders may take the form of a joke—is an apt dramatic motif for an age of conditioned behaviour in which orthodox man is a willing collaborator in his own destruction".
"Just two years later" (1960), however, Wardle retracted "Comedy of Menace" in his review of The Caretaker, stating: "On the strength of 'The Birthday Party' and the pair of one-acters, I rashly applied the phrase 'comedy of menace' to Pinter's writing. I now take it back".
After Wardle's retraction of comedy of menace as he had applied it to Pinter's writing, Pinter himself also occasionally disavowed it and questioned its relevance to his work (as he also did with his own offhand but apt statement that his plays are about "the weasel under the cocktail cabinet"). For example, in December 1971, in his interview with Pinter about Old Times, Mel Gussow recalled that "After The Homecoming [Pinter] said that [he] 'couldn't any longer stay in the room with this bunch of people who opened doors and came in and went out. Landscape and Silence [the two short poetic memory plays that were written between The Homecoming and Old Times] are in a very different form. There isn't any menace at all.' " Later, when Gussow asked Pinter to expand on his view that he had "tired" of "menace", Pinter added: "when I said that I was tired of menace, I was using a word that I didn't coin. I never thought of menace myself. It was called 'comedy of menace' quite a long time ago [1958]. I never stuck categories on myself, or on any of us [playwrights]. But if what I understand the word menace to mean is certain elements that I have employed in the past in the shape of a particular play, then I don't think it's worthy of much more exploration".
Despite Wardle's retraction of comedy of menace (and Pinter's later qualifications), Comedy of menace and comedies of menace caught on and have been prevalent since the late 1950s in advertisements and in critical accounts, notices, and reviews to describe Pinter's early plays and some of his later work as well. As Merritt points out, among other examples of critics' usage of this and similar categories of Pinter's work, after Gussow's 1971 "conversation" with Pinter, "Though he echoes Wardle's concept, Gussow seems to avoid using comedy of menace when reviewing the CSC Repertory Theatre's 1988 production of The Birthday Party. While still emphasizing Pinter's 'terrors' and the 'shiver beneath the laughter,' Gussow describes the play as "a play of intrigue, with an underlying motif of betrayal' … [and] [Bernard F.] Dukore calls the play 'a comedy (of menace or otherwise)'".
In discussing the first production of Pinter's first full-length play, The Birthday Party (1958), which followed his first play, The Room (1957), his authorised official biographer Michael Billington points out that Wardle "once excellently" described its setting (paraphrasing Wardle), as "a banal living-room [which] opens up to the horrors of modern history".