(Re)Thinking Harold Pinter’s Comedy of Menace

(Re)Thinking Harold Pinter’s Comedy of Menace

Basil Chiasson

1. Introduction
This essay argues for a re-thinking of the descriptive phrase “comedy
of menace” as it relates to Harold Pinter’s work and that critical uses
of the phrase and understandings of its dramatic articulations need to
be expanded. By revisiting and clarifying first menace and then
comedy, sundering the two terms only for purposes of review and
interrogation, I hope to demonstrate how comedy and menace are
necessarily bound up, and are thus mutually empowering.
The general sentiment is that Pinter’s earliest plays can be
characterized as comedies of menace and, moreover, his later and
more precisely political plays break with that aesthetic or tradition.
To the contrary, in this essay, I argue that the comedy of menace
aesthetic is dramatically crucial to the later political plays as well,
albeit they have undergone a transmutation in the way of content,
form, and effect. Despite and in fact because of such a transmutation,
certain family resemblances between Pinter’s earliest and more recent
plays come forth, inviting a re-imagining of Pinter’s “original”
comedy of menace, and suggesting that this term can be stretched over
the playwright’s entire oeuvre.
To utter the phrase comedy of menace is, for many,
tantamount to saying Harold Pinter’s name. However, one of the
several ways in which the conflation of Pinter’s name and comedy of
menace can appear as ironic is that Pinter did not coin the phrase, nor
was he the first playwright with whom it was associated.1 The phrase
and its corresponding dramatic aesthetic derives from David
Campton’s 1958 play The Lunatic View, whose subtitle characterized
the play as A Comedy of Menace. Yet, despite comedy of menace
being Campton’s “birthright,” it was theater reviewer Irving Wardle
who linked the phrase to Pinter in his glowing appraisal of the
author’s 1958 play The Birthday Party.
32 Basil Chiasson
From the article, itself entitled “Comedy of Menace,” here is
Wardle’s most quoted description of Pinter’s aesthetic formulation:
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
behavior in which orthodox man is a willing collaborator in his
own destruction. (33)
In portraying not Campton but Pinter as the bellwether of this
emergent theatrical aesthetic, Wardle began to fashion Campton’s
subtitle into a concept and a critical tool, which represents one of the
more significant contributions to Pinter scholarship. It would seem,
however, that Wardle’s assertion that Pinter delivers all things
menacing in joke form gives short shrift to Pinter’s aestheticization of
comedy. Wardle inspired a way of speaking about Pinter’s work that
would have lasting consequences. For it was he who set the stage for
Pinter criticism to routinely attend more to the menace than to the
comedy, often discussing the two as if they were wholly separable.
Walter Kerr suggested as much when nine years later he insisted that
“‘Menacing’ is the adjective most often used to describe the events in
a Pinter play” (14).
2. On Menace
Pinter himself once insisted that “Menace is everywhere. There is
plenty of menace in this very room, at this very moment, you know.
You can’t avoid it; you can’t get away from it” (qtd in Sakellaridou
1999, 97). Culling from myriad descriptions of what constitutes
“menace,” I offer the following modest overview of how it figures in
Pinter’s work. What is often referred to as “the infamous Pinter pause”
(Batty 19) is the obvious and indeed best point of departure for any
discussion of the elements commonly thought to represent, engender,
or perpetrate menace in Pinter’s plays. Although its function
throughout the playwright’s oeuvre is by no means uniform, the Pinter
pause is typically analyzed on the basis of its dramatic virtues, which
is to say that as a device it orients us to the performative character of
speech more so than to the characters’ (and the author’s) desire or
capacity to convey information.2 The Pinter pause’s lack of lexical
content is precisely what makes the device inextricable from and
(Re)Thinking Harold Pinter’s Comedy of Menace 33
instrumental to a great deal of the speech that issues forth from
Pinter’s characters. A principal weapon or tool in the arsenal of every
Pinter character, the pause can function to either empower or
dismantle statements and entire conversations, rendering speech
suggestive, ironic, suspect, and so on. Facilitating the performative
character of language, the pause only underscores how in Pinter’s
world “it is impossible to detach what is said from the way in which it
is said” (Wardle 30) and, moreover, how language does not solely
signify and thus “mean”-- it resonates deep within the body, in and
across its many folds and thresholds.
On the one hand, “The alternation of language and pause in
Pinter can define the nature of the communication” (Randisi 63).3 This
is to say that the aesthetic structure of the pause and spoken words
(affecting what might be thought of as a rhythm) can invite
qualifications as to the kind of relationship that is shaping up between
characters. On the other hand, it can appear that “The pause is the
pause because of what has just happened in the minds and guts of the
characters” (Gale 273) and that “intense [yet indiscernible] thought
processes are continuing” (Esslin 220). This is exemplified by the
following early exchange between Ben and Gus in The Dumb Waiter:
BEN: You know what you’re trouble is?
GUS: What?
BEN: You haven’t got any interests.
GUS: I’ve got interests.
BEN: What? Tell me one of you’re interests.
Pause.
GUS: I’ve got interests. (118)
Even though the pause is devoid of linguistic meaning proper, it
effectively produces another form of “meaning,” which Alice N.
Benston gestures towards in her assertion that “Throughout his work,
Pinter has used pauses to make the point that the command of
language is a question of power” (123).
Perhaps nearly as infamous as the Pinter pause is his strategic
use of of silence, which in the plays can function as yet another potent
theatrical device, an equal if not heightened means to intersperse and
thus punctuate the cascades of speech that Pinter’s characters use as
everyday weapons on each other. Consider, for example, how even
before the first sounds and words issue forth in The Dumb Waiter, the
play’s stage directions posit three uses of silence, no doubt as a means
34 Basil Chiasson
to generate a specific dramatic atmosphere (113). Although the
silence’s and the pause’s respective duration and dramatic application
are contingent to dramatic context4, both devices converge in so far as
they can be implicated in producing identifiable dramatic “meaning”
of the type Benston observes (the circulation or exchange of power as
a theme), and also of the nature that pertains to creating specific kinds
of experiences for audience members.
While Pinter’s characters, furthermore, perform varying
degrees of reticence or even silence, the impact of such linguistic
“absences” can often derive much of its power from a forceful, even
overwhelming loquacity. In conjunction with all else contributing to
the tension mounting in the Birmingham basement flat in The Dumb
Waiter, Gus’s unrelenting questions and banter, for example,
significantly provoke not only Ben but also the audience. The
problem, however, is that the overly talkative characters present their
interlocutors, and us, the audience, with a form of speech that is quite
shy of truth claims. We are exposed to statements and
actions/behavior that are contradictory as well as private anecdotes
that are dragged up from the past, a semiology that forms a cryptic
language whose many claims cannot be corroborated and judged for
truth values. The dramatic irony that other theatrical experiences
might offer audiences is, at best, fractured, and, at worst, wholly
denied, replaced with something like that which Elin Diamond calls a
“thickening atmosphere” (102).
Different, moreover, but not unrelated to both pause and
silence is Pinter’s absenting of character motivation as a means to
create ambiguity. Particularly in his early comedies of menace, Pinter
writes characters such that their inner lives and thought processes are
obfuscated or even elided, which leaves the audience to speculate on
and imagine what lies beneath and at least partially motivates the
characters’ highly performative and, thus, potentially meaningful
demeanor and speech. This aesthetic feature has led critics such as
Robert Conklin to characterize the structural composition of Pinter’s
plays and the experience of interfacing with them as akin to taking a
Rorschach test (20).
Pinter’s aestheticization of menace in his earlier plays
involves, but is not limited to, other devices and mechanisms such as:
the staging of situations of intrusion, intermingling aggression or even
violence with verbal and physical comedy, speech that is riddled with
non- sequiturs; characters who incessantly pose questions (on this
(Re)Thinking Harold Pinter’s Comedy of Menace 35
point, one curiously finds the appearance of no less than twenty-eight
questions by the time Ben and Gus begin to quarrel over the basement
toilet’s deficient ballcock); characters who refuse to answer other
characters’ questions, or, similarly, characters who suffer auditory
lapses. While this particular “disability” is perhaps most evident in
The Room’s landlord Mr. Kidd, it is arguable that the dumb waiter
apparatus itself suffers from a similar affliction, its inexorable
demands and general inattentiveness to the characters’ protestations
suggesting as much.
Menace in Pinter is also developed through a tenuous causal
physics whereby onstage causes are either vaguely linked to or
effectively sundered from effects,5 through characters that produce
haphazard or continually faltering “narratives;” by a form of temporal
mapping: characters whose vague histories infect their identities and
relationships in the present, or those whose interactions in the present
plunge them into the mental landscape of their pasts and, thus, foment
social breakdown. Menace can also derive from characters having to
negotiate the threat of change or, conversely, the threat of stasis (Klein
195); from problems of miscommunication that become menacing in
their “circular effect” (Gale 20); from the creation of specific and
overall regimes of body movement onstage (Counsell 155), which at
various levels can signify and/or produce menace; and lastly, but
certainly not exhaustively, menace can be engineered through
allusions to Pinter’s own work and to the work of others.
Consider how Ben and Gus are like shadowy cousins to
Goldberg and McCann in The Birthday Party, and that both pair of
intruders “allude to the threatening ‘hit men’ of the gangster film” and
“to the comedy cross-talk acts of popular theater, film, and radio”
(Peacock 65).6 More than a celebratory nod to his influences, Pinter’s
use of allusion can be said to function dramatically, doing so on the
terms of a clichés’ original context. In this way, Goldberg and
McCann and Gus and Ben perform the same functions as the gangster
film and music hall figures with which they are in dialogue: they
represent comic and sinister characters, perhaps making us laugh or
feel slightly nervous. Yet, Pinter’s treatment of cliché goes somewhat
further.
According to Gilles Deleuze, exceptional art only begins with
“the catastrophic disruption of the actual or the clichéd” (2003, 100).
That is, when cliché is invoked or re-instated -- only to be done some
sort of aesthetic violence -- the audience can find itself confronted
36 Basil Chiasson
with “the emergence of another world -- a non-representative, nonnarrative,
non-figurative world.”7 As spectators we might find a
certain delight in being bombarded with questions, but the relative
lack of control over what we observe (a control that music hall and
much comedy affords or even depends upon) edges us from the realm
of figuration (a realm that presents coherent and thus “readable” signs)
ever-closer to the realm of figurality, where cognition and
interpretation is troubled, often stymied.
In The Dumb Waiter, the hired killers’ banter appears stilted
and illogical as it takes up, but never lingers on, varied topics ranging
from morbid news tidbits, the deficient or degenerate state of their
temporary accommodation, to how “these places” “change hands
overnight” (132), and the possibility that their taskmaster “Wilson”
has “probably only rented it” (129) -- yet these comic flourishes
dissolve, without ever striving towards any identifiable goal such as a
punch line or a conclusion. Rather, the play’s allusions to familiar
types from popular film, theater, and radio create a space for the
gradual production of anxiety and its emotional derivatives.
Remarking on the use of cliché to solicit an investment that becomes
variously difficult, Alice Rayner opines that “Pinter has a remarkable
capacity to make his plays resist any attempts to re-form the
dislocations of his plotting into a story. Yet he maintains a sufficient
number of a story’s features to invite such reformations” (483). If
anything, Ben’s demand to know “What’s going on here?” and Gus’s
reply (preceded by a pause) “What do you mean?” (135) invite us to
ask the very questions these characters advance, only on a number of
levels that range from Pinter’s various dramatic revitalizations to the
play’s production of certain interpretive and physiological-emotional
consequences, specifically on the part of spectators.
Bert O. States once claimed that “in the theater, as in any art,
there is always the need to defamiliarize all of the old familiar
defamiliarizations” (43), and what takes place in the comedies of
menace is a process of aesthetic inversion; in this process, Pinter’s
characters borrow from comic and thriller genres only to deploy
various tactics (for example, stichomythia and/or interrogation) to an
effect that typically gets qualified as menacing. Another way in which
Pinter’s comedies of menace revitalize theater by re-imagining
familiar clichés involves the interdependency of verbal and physical
regimes, the way the actor’s demeanor and body language in any
given staging can, and indeed should, operate in league with what is
(Re)Thinking Harold Pinter’s Comedy of Menace 37
spoken and implied, either elucidating or troubling it. Take, for
example, the moment after the mysterious speaking tube voice (a
voice that signifies menace in that spectators cannot hear and thus
confirm it as “actual”) articulates that all the food products were
unsatisfactory, and Ben “glares at Gus” (140).8 Here, in the
characters’ gazes, we find an aesthetic site that is crucial to the
production of menace in The Dumb Waiter. As Rayner says, “Pinter
manifests the power of an absolute in moments of non-verbal gaze
between characters, moments that mark the instance of danger and
fascination when one is captured and overpowered while gazing”
(496-7). Similarly, Joseph Hines observes how menace may “be
present in the dialogue or the physical arrangement -- as in The Dumb
Waiter” (5).
Yet, perhaps Hines verges on constructing too rigid a binary
between speech and body movement. Consider how any given speech
act and gesture can be either synchronous or temporally staggered and
still betray a mutual dramatic dependency and/or reciprocal
empowerment. I would suggest further that most speech acts and
bodily gestures are bound up with all others in the production of
dramatic effect such that what is said and done at the beginning of The
Dumb Waiter, for example, can profoundly intersect with what is said
and performed at other, distant junctures in the play. Thus, Gus’s exit
to the lavatory and re-entry while Ben reclines on the bed with a
newspaper in the play’s first moments foreshadows The Dumb
Waiter’s shocking conclusion. The fact that the physical arrangement
of the play’s final moment is, in its earlier incarnation, bounded by
dialogue, and, in the last instance, by silence marks the trajectory of
Ben’s and Gus’s relationship. Their relationship alters from that of
putative colleagues to predator and quarry, while all interceding
moments of petty conflict throughout the play strive towards and
bolster this final scene.
Although Ben and Gus effectively stage and perform
menacing scenarios and then putatively experience menace at the level
of the stage, in the process they also produce something involved in
menace that registers within the audience and is, therefore, operative
at a physiological level: the level of the spectator’s material body.
This recognition requires that we look beyond how Pinter’s aesthetic
of menace may be regarded as a mimesis of menace, and approached
predominantly with a view to what menace means in the context of the
stage space and the characters, that is, how menace is represented
38 Basil Chiasson
there. To acknowledge that the aestheticization of menace is also a
physiological issue is to direct our attention away from the spectator’s
gaze, and thus away from what might be called the politics of
representation, to a concern with how “the visual experience of the
[theatrical] encounter impinges upon the materiality of the
viewer”(Barbara Kennedy 16).9
Hence, in order to edge away from a strict discussion of the
mimesis of menace and ever-towards menace’s physiological
character and possibility, I offer Batty’s more general remarks on
“seeing” a play:
A theatrical experience […] is seldom one that can readily be
“made sense” of. Its communicative power is the kind that is felt
and recognized at a less than conscious level, and one that often
belies articulation […] What a play might be “about” is more
often than not only one part of a formula that might make that
play a significant piece of theater. The dramatic manipulation of
that “subject matter” is the more relevant part of the formula.
This, after all, is the element that works upon our feelings and
nerves when watching any performance. (2, my emphasis)
These remarks are informed by the way in which characters such as
Gus and Ben solicit both intellectual and emotional responses from the
audience, only to do and say things that repeatedly trouble spectators’
intellectual-emotional processes and paths. Whether, for example, Gus
and Ben’s apparent showdown in The Dumb Waiter’s final tableau
solicits alarm, horror, or, as Penelope Prentice understands, “audience
sympathy for [both] characters” (19), or, whether it invites derisive
laughter, and thus our judgment and condescension, the characters are
constant in the various and unpredictable ways in which they initiate
audience interest only as a means to frustrate it. While Ben and Gus
themselves effectively stage and perform menacing scenarios at the
level of the stage, in the process, they also produce a menace that
circulates throughout the audience. As Hines observes: “Pinter makes
us uneasy […] because he gets us in the guts, where he implies we
live” (13).

3. On Comedy
Despite critics’ tendency to focus on menace in Pinter’s work, there
are indeed some notable exceptions. As examples consider Lois G.
Gordon, who asserts that “The comic element in Pinter predominates”
(Re)Thinking Harold Pinter’s Comedy of Menace 39
(6); Elin Diamond, who has thus far produced the only monograph to
take up Pinter’s aestheticization of comedy; and Bernard Dukore, who
observes that “From The Room to No Man’s Land, a span of almost
twenty years, all but a very few of Pinter’s plays are tragicomedies”
and as such are “Associated initially and primarily with comedy” (72).
However much these and other critics’ characterizations of Pinter’s
comic play differ, one finds that irony and parody are central. For
example, in reference to the crop of music hall-inspired exchanges in
The Dumb Waiter, not least of which is Ben and Gus’s rumpus over an
acceptable signifier with which to refer to boiling water for tea,
Gordon identifies how Pinter “lampoons the banal clichéd banter
revered in the word-games played in the lives of the educated and
uneducated, as well as those of the rich and poor [and] brings to life
the everyday silliness of Everyman and in so doing is uncannily
funny” (6).10
In reading The Dumb Waiter, Gordon looks specifically to the
staging of that which is intended to be or is in fact funny, attending to
the meaning of the signifiers that generate irony and parody. Like
many critics, she constructs herself vis-à-vis art as a subject observing
an object of study (the play) from a distance, watching and
interpreting Ben and Gus’s every move and speech act in an attempt to
interpret and ultimately explain the play’s various meanings, or
perhaps even its entire representational economy. The tendency to
understand how comedy is and should be interpreted effectively
privileges language’s locutionary capacity -- truly a demonstration of
how we often think of language predominantly “as a vehicle for
messages among speakers” (Colebrook 109). As a compliment to this
manner of proceeding critically, I propose a consideration of
laughter’s visceral quality. The immediate and forceful reality of
laughter’s healing and its painful effects alike emphasizes the fact that
the theatrical experience is about more than intellection. From State’s
claim that humor in the theater is “incomplete without the audience”
(173), I suggest that we might glean not simply the obvious, that
humor and a play needs an audience, but more specifically that there
are experiential contingencies beyond our simply understanding and
appreciating Pinter’s dramatic “jokes.”
The critical consequence of looking beyond a hermeneutics of
meaning is to engage with or even work through how Pinter’s comedy
can operate on us by resonating within us, doing so by evoking
audience responses, some of these being within descriptive reach,
40 Basil Chiasson
while others remain beyond articulation and thus have no subjective
(verbal or imagistic) content. If we reflect upon how the plays can
perform on us to specific ends -- how they might play upon our
nervous systems so as to invite, evoke, and provoke responses as well
as foment changes in us such that we turn from the text or leave the
theater in states remarkably other than how we arrived -- it becomes
apparent how deeply related to the menace are the quite varied comic
tendencies and the various responses of laughter they stand to evoke.
Accommodating the theater audience, Andrew Kennedy
insists that we must respond to Pinter’s “violent parody” (182), while
Arnold Hinchliffe observes more pointedly that in Pinter “We find a
comedy that frightens and causes pain” (38). These remarks,
moreover, speak to Dukore’s metaphor and understanding that
comedy in Pinter’s plays can effectively serve as a weapon. Citing The
Caretaker, Dukore posits that comedy can at times be “savage, for the
characters -- sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly -- taunt each
other;” the crux, however, is to be found in his second premise which,
like the others, speaks to the issue of audience response: “While [the
characters’] mocking amuses the spectator, its underlying
destructiveness also shocks him” (43). Just as comedy can in one
regard function as a weapon characters wield on stage -- sometimes
even literally as when James throws the butter knife at Bill in The
Collection -- it can, in constituting another function or order of
“meaning,” be fashioned by the playwright as a weapon to be used on
the audience. I suggest that we might thus extrapolate from Dukore’s
observation of any spectator’s potential journey, from amusement to
revulsion or shock, a process that centers on his or her own complicity
in the contentious stage events.
It would seem, then, that through instrumentalizing laughter
and menace, [0]Pinter is seeking to foster in us an awareness of the
degree to which we subscribe to certain ideological positions. It is in
being staged and then evoked -- for is not our “approval” captured in
our laughter? -- that these ideological positions or viewpoints are
being obliquely critiqued. And of course, this staging marks a process
of alerting us to how ideologies operate through us, how we articulate
ideology/ies we might otherwise reject. Hence Francesca Coppa’s
interest in laughter’s affective potentialities, specifically those that can
inform and manipulate cognition. Rather than seeing a back and forth
between comedy and menace, and thus to a certain extent defining the
terms as a conceptual binary, Coppa sees comedy as in league with
(Re)Thinking Harold Pinter’s Comedy of Menace 41
menace and asserts that the establishment of “complex personal
identifications and motivations” ultimately denies spectators the “easy
divisions and easy laughter” that “traditional comedy” typically offers
them (55). Characterizing Pinter’s humor as a complexly subversive
“Freudian joke triangle,” Coppa insists that “the important jokes” in
Pinter “are generally the ones which make the audience stop laughing,
which make the audiences [sic] question their own alliance with the
aggressive joke-tellers” (55).11 In acknowledging, at one level,
Pinter’s subversion of “traditional comedy” and, at another level, the
potentially subversive consequences of a spectator’s emotional,
psychological, intellectual, and indeed ideological investments, Coppa
gestures towards Deleuze’s assertion that the manipulation of cliché
can introduce spectators to other realities, those whose economies are
extra-discursive, and which involve relations of force, intensities, and
blocs of sensation.
In line with arguments for laughter’s visceral character and its
collusion with menace -- yet even more attuned to the forces at work
on both stage characters and spectators -- Batty argues that The Dumb
Waiter “is no straightforward comedy. Forces beyond these men’s
[Ben and Gus’s] comprehension and control are operating upon them,
and their responses take on both farcical and tragic resonances” (16,
my emphasis). This observation gestures towards how The Dumb
Waiter does not always vacillate between comic and menacing
moments but rather imbricates either element such that comedy and
menace appear and function as necessary to one another. The
observation, however, is most valuable to this discussion for its
attention to the physiological contract into which Pinter’s play invites
audiences to enter. In effect, the play’s aestheticization of comedy and
menace invites intellectual responses and physiological-emotional
reactions that are most often rendered thoroughly ambivalent, yet
nonetheless experientially intense, and it does so precisely through a
process that solicits spectator interest and investment, only to displace
and do violence to both.
This is perhaps most apparent in the penultimate scene when
Ben reads out the final order to be sent up the dumb waiter --
“Scampi!,” a scene whose comic flourish does not fade but rather
becomes mired in Ben and Gus’s sudden eruption into physical
violence, a violence that we are frequently made to anticipate in
Pinter’s plays but which so rarely manifests as it does here:
42 Basil Chiasson
He [Ben] crumples the note, picks up the tube, takes out the
whistle, blows and speaks.
WE’VE GOT NOTHING LEFT! NOTHING! DO YOU
UNDERSTAND?
Ben seizes the tube and flings Gus away. He follows Gus and
slaps him hard, back-handed across the chest.
BEN: Stop it! You maniac!
GUS: But you heard!
BEN: (savagely). That’s enough! I’m warning you!
Silence (146).
This scene demonstrates how Pinter’s aesthetic does not involve
clearly defined transitions from humorous moments to those that are
menacing, but instead a vista in which the possibility and indeed the
“reality” of both elements is most often simultaneously in play.
Dukore is quite right in observing that “The disparity between
the demands for unusual food and Gus’s inadequate substitutes
provides a source of comedy, but the sight of Gus emptying all he has
in order to satisfy an unseen master […] undercuts the humor” (19-
20). However, while some may see the humor expressed in the dumb
waiter’s demand for “Scampi!” as overwhelmed by the everintensifying
submerged violence[0] that erupts into an actual physical
confrontation, others might find the humor and menace sustained or
even perpetuated in equal measure[0], the complex of both elements
due in large part to the indelible and ridiculous image of a dumb
waiter apparatus that is hungry for “pretty high class” dishes such as
Macaroni Pastitsio and Ormitha Macarounada having to settle for the
likes of Smith’s crisps, McVitie treats, a stale Eccles cake, and so on.
We must consider that those with a more morbid sense of humor, and
who are thus forever niggled by the fact that it was, after all, an
inanimate object (the dumb waiter) and “Scampi!” that helped bring
about Ben’s savage physical outburst, might see the humor as
lingering, perhaps even intensifying. Bringing to mind the old
ambivalent expression “not knowing whether to laugh or to cry,” this
scene’s collapse of the boundary between that which is ostensibly
funny and that which is not instantiates Pinter’s own claim in the
speech “Writing for Myself” that “The old categories of comedy and
tragedy and farce are irrelevant” (1996, xi).12
Regardless of the “Scampi!” scene’s representational
implications, its intermingling of humor, menace, and actual physical
violence stands to provoke a complex set of reactions in spectators.
Consider how this scene’s dramatic developments shuttle spectators
(Re)Thinking Harold Pinter’s Comedy of Menace 43
from a potential laugh born of ridiculous circumstances that draw on
music hall and farce, to an aura of violence, to an infrequently realized
physical violence, and finally to a forceful silence. All the while, the
entire journey retains the residue of laughter; it was, after all,
“Scampi!” that set things in motion and that is implicated in the
violence that erupts. With Pinter there is no laughter that does not
strive to justify its existence on the basis of menace. Perhaps, then,
Gus’s tentative assertion to Ben that “that’s a bit funny isn’t it?” can
be read as a rhetorical assertion of comedy’s dramatic need of menace,
and vice versa (132); it represents an assertion whose silence suggests
that nothing in this play is unequivocally funny, or tragic for that
matter.
In negotiating an effective staging of The Dumb Waiter, the
spectator’s journey is such that he or she is subject to, with great
frequency if not at every moment, a complex of physio-sensory shifts
brought on by the play’s wholly unpredictable redistributions of comic
and menacing tendencies and bursts of actual physical violence. It is
only later (post-event) that stimuli in the form of comedy and menace
and reactions to it can be qualified as such: in terms of a verbal
description of emotional responses. Any descriptive language that
derives from our being made to laugh and from our being menaced is
preceded by, and entirely contingent to, galvanic bodily activity that
begins in visceral registers. What we have here is the production of
pre- and non-verbal activity (pre-ideological) as a means to stimulate
the sort of cognitive activity that can be called higher-order thinking.
In short, we feel Pinter’s plays, at stages ranging from the unconscious
to the conscious, then we describe and label the remembered
experience, doing so with varying degrees of articulacy. The play’s
impact can therefore be defined Page: 43
[0]both by that primary series of responses (and the impact of one
response on subsequent ones) and that subsequent attempt to
categorize the experience. That the former exists necessarily outside
the security of linguistic appropriation that the latter offers, and that
the latter represents only an aporia of capture of the former,
contributes to any measure of menace within that impact.13
In view of an audience’s visceral, sensory-cognitive, and
emotional relationship to scenes such as Gus reading to Ben from his
newspaper a litany of harrowing events, the remarkable linguistic
agon over whether the kettle or the gas gets lit, the functional
vicissitudes of a mysterious and fickle off-stage toilet, and the
44 Basil Chiasson
eponymous dumb waiter’s intervention, consider how the play’s
variegated sign systems possess an extra-linguistic “other side”
beyond representation. I suggest, then, that the complex of menace (in
the physiological capacity of anxiety) and comedy (in the equally
physiological capacity of laughter) are the affective intensities that
Pinter’s comedies of menace (as art) may produce. Simon O’Sullivan
tells us that affects, as extra-discursive and extra-textual phenomena,
can be described as “moments of intensity,” produced by a virtual
“collision” of the spectator’s faculties and senses and the work of art
in a decidedly physiological space, as a virtual-material event (2001,
125). As such, the sensations we experience (as given by the play)
“are not images perceived by us “outside” of our body, but rather
affections localized within the body” (Barbara Kennedy 119). If we
conceive of The Dumb Waiter as not so much an object that we look
upon as spectators and more so as “a reaction in/on the body at the
level of matter,” the play therefore being “immanent to matter”
(O’Sullivan 2001, 125), then I suggest that Pinter’s comedy of menace
begins to trouble traditional notions of spectatorship and indeed
humanist understandings of subjectivity.
Given the difficulty, if not impossibility, of articulating the
sensible moment and delineating, furthermore, the correspondence
between the semiotic complex on stage and its various resonances on
the spectator’s nervous system -- best termed an “affective capture”
(O’Sullivan 2001, 125) -- such phenomena eludes sufficient verbal
qualification. Hence, descriptives along the lines of “I felt anxiety or
menaced during scene, moment, or event X in The Dumb Waiter” can
appear as a form of question begging. What can be suggested,
however, is that the physiological aspect of art with which O’Sullivan
is concerned “might still be understood as a sign of sorts,” just not
“merely [as] a signifying one” (2006, 163).

4. The Politics of Affect
I would suggest that Pinter’s various political plays provide a forum to
examine just what we mean by the non-significatory aspects of
dramatic signs. One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988),
The New World Order (1991), Party Time (1991), Ashes to Ashes
(1996), Moonlight (1993), and Celebration (2000) respectively stage
images of harassment and interrogation, whose force and effect not
only appears to be the plight of onstage characters, but also intends to
(Re)Thinking Harold Pinter’s Comedy of Menace 45
act upon and arrest the audience. In soliciting viewers to endure, to
enter into this physical forum, these plays underline Deleuze and
Guattari’s assertion that “aesthetic composition is the work of
sensation” (1991, 192). It might seem that the power struggles and the
often repellent stage images in these more recent plays are a long way
from the power plays taking place between Pinter’s ambivalently
comic and, dare it even be said, likable characters in the comedies of
menace. Emphasizing this apparent disparity, Richard Dutton insists
that plays such as “One for the Road represent an even greater break
with Pinter’s artistic past, with an emphasis on political and human
rights issues that would have been out of place in his tragicomedies”
(5).
However, in the words of that play’s antagonist Nicolas, I
suggest that there is more of a link or a bond between Pinter’s artistic
past and his recent plays than one might at first suspect. Although we
may not, and are as a rule not intended to laugh at theatrical victims
whose plight is to endure psychological and physical torture, rape, and
the torments of all manner of politicking, the games and the jokes are
unmistakably present. Consider Nicolas’s apparent delight at
tormenting Victor with questions regarding whether his wife Gila
“fucks,” or, moreover, how the game of posing logically unanswerable
questions is the lynchpin of Nicolas’s interrogation of all three of the
play’s victims. In the first instance, the games and jokes are
instrumental to the victimizer in his or her project of breaking victims
down.14 However, in the second instance -- an instance which involves
our being broken down, as it were -- humor functions to solicit
complex emotional reactions from the audience; some of these
reactions can be identified and qualified with language, while others
evade description due to their resonance at unconscious levels
beginning at the viscera and across and within other proprioceptive
(stimuli within the organism) regions. Certainly one of the more
potent examples of this can be found in the various quips Nicolas
makes regarding the execrable realities for which he is responsible,
the dramatic function of such quips being to darken and magnetize the
audience’s prostration and revulsion. To Gila he says:
You’re of no interest to me. I might even let you out of here in
due course. But I should think you might entertain us all a little
more before you go. Blackout (One for the Road 244).
46 Basil Chiasson
Consider, furthermore, how the painful immediacy of
Jimmy’s physical presence and euphoric monologue at the close of
Party Time in itself provokes an unmediated anxiety in spectators, yet
the image is charged by and thus necessarily bound up with a number
of snapshots of jovial cocktail banter that precede it: snapshots such as
Liz’s preoccupation with “the nymphomaniac slut” and “bigtitted tart”
that “raped” her love interest (290); Terry and Dusty’s verbal tête-àtête
that ironically conflates the torture and murder of dissidents with
married couples (301-02); and Melissa’s overly melodramatic and
thus comical toast to the “unshakable, rigorous, fundamental” and
“constant” “moral foundation” of “our club” (311). Even though the
comedy in these plays is more for certain characters to enjoy, and thus
less on offer for spectators (if only tentatively so), the comic element
remains operative and in the service of promoting what might be
thought of as a new form of menace, where the reactions it stands to
produce are arguably much starker.
A further example presents itself in the final scene in
Mountain Language. In this context, the humor of the remark is
specifically intended for the Sergeant and the Guard’s enjoyment;
however, the harrowing fact remains that in the play’s final scene the
Sergeant’s assertion regarding the Prisoner who is collapsed and
“shaking on the floor” is in fact a joke: “Look at this. You go out of
your way to give them a helping hand and they fuck it up” (267).15
Pinter uses comedy here to facilitate the emotional violence that the
Sergeant’s curtain line attempts to perform on us. And the Sergeant’s
remark, according to Batty, “has all the force of a punchline, too --
reinforced by the blackout. We have a near Pavlovian response to such
structured punchlines -- a self-administered expectation of pleasure
from neat surprise -- and here that response is at odds with our ethical
faculties. It’s not that we find it funny, but that we recognize that we
have been invited to join in a laugh that we simultaneously and
instantaneously don’t recognize as funny”[0] (27). Pinter’s most
odious characters create tension in the audience by broadcasting
familiar conventions through a deeply contentious lens, as they
punctuate their dastardly remarks and admissions with wry smiles,
ironic quips, and even laughs.
Gesturing toward this aesthetics of force, Elizabeth
Sakellaridou speaks of a “subterranean effect” that operates in
spectators at a cognitive-emotive level, an effect performed on the
audience that is bound up with the content of Pinter’s later plays and
(Re)Thinking Harold Pinter’s Comedy of Menace 47
contributing significantly to the political work they do: “If [the
political plays’] appeal is emotional because of lack of historical
specificity, distancing of audience, narrative and debate, the selection
and presentation of images is based on an unmistakable cognitive
process which restores the balance and channels the ideological
direction of the play” (1989, 45). Sakellaridou’s simultaneous
attention to the works’ selection and presentation of images and to
their specific ideological direction demonstrates her interest in
sighting a politics in the affective potential of the later plays.
Following Sakellaridou, I suggest that in seeking to merge
content and form, and thus emulate a subject matter dealing with the
(ab)use of power and the infliction of psychological torment and
physical pain, the form in the political plays must necessarily be made
“violent” and thus menace spectators’ psychological, emotional, and
physical well-being. A distinctly violent subject matter will require a
formal violence that is appropriately matched. While the characters’
performance of speech acts and postures functions as a critique of the
very behavior being staged, performed, and fabulated, the by-product
that is the audience’s plight is no less a part of the politics. In the
words of a playwright most unlike Pinter, yet nonetheless illustrative
for the way he seeks to wed ideology and physiology, Howard Barker
insists that “Anxiety must be the condition of witnessing drama that
takes moral speculation, not social imitation, as its unfaltering
objective” (111).
As much as we have come to rely on words such as anxiety
and menace, the articulation (and reconciliation) of language
(signifiers) and of physical experience remains an intellectual
quandary. Finding this quandary nonetheless inviting and poignant,
Deleuze argues, according to O’Sullivan, that a work of art should be
examined with a view to its capacity to generate and deploy forces of
intensity, thus operating in the capacity of a machine that acts upon a
spectator’s neural-sensory network. Accordingly, art is about
experiencing sensations as much as it is about intellection and
gleaning meaning(s) (2006, 58). Relationships between spectators and
art works can become most notable for the way the forces of any work
“act upon the force(s) of our subjectivity” (Ibid. 58) -- this very
phenomenon itself constituting a significant form of meaning. If it
does not seem too far a stretch to understand both Pinter’s earlier
comedies of menace and his more precisely political plays in these
terms, in terms of their affective potential that is, then the audience48
Basil Chiasson
play relationship necessarily presents itself as a matter of relations of
force: the play acting upon the spectators, and even spectators acting
upon the play, the ideological positions and subjectivities of both
audience members and the stage actors “vibrating” under the strain of
the work.16
Take the eruptions of “actual” violence in plays such as The
Room, The Dumb Waiter, The Birthday Party, and The Homecoming,
along with the comic episodes that bookend and thus embellish them,
and then hold them up for consideration alongside the kind of violence
the political plays can engineer both on stage and in the audience. It
would seem that both eras of Pinter’s work involve the engagement of
a similar visceral register -- even despite the different value judgments
we might place on the effects of laughter and of anxiety, and however
variously we might qualify our physiological and emotional responses
to plays from either era. Consider the potential resonance between
moments such as when Gus backhands Ben or when Max “hits JOEY
in the stomach with all his might” (The Homecoming 42) and when
the Sergeant suggests that “Intellectual arses wobble the best”
(Mountain Language 257), or when Nicolas uses the past tense at the
end of One for the Road to inform Victor that his son “was a little
prick” and is thus likely now dead (247). The type of humor (either
more accessible to the audience, as in the earlier plays, or egregious
such that it remains for the most part hermetically sealed off at the
proscenium, as in the political plays) and our engagement with it
(either via attitudes and/or feelings of ephemeral delight, ambivalence,
or disgust) will differ significantly across Pinter’s oeuvre. However, it
is noteworthy that all these plays speak a predominantly visceral
language that impacts the audience’s emotions, evoking laughter and
anxiety and all their experiential derivatives in such a way as to edge
spectators beyond cliché and familiar experience.17
If we consider how Pinter’s earlier comedies of menace
manipulate either element in the dramatic aesthetic so as to engender
various affects in spectators, it seems impossible to identify where the
comedy and the menace respectively begin and end; the effort to
process comedy and menace as distinct and separate units of
experience remains problematic. That the intensification of both
character-audience identification and of laughter is wholly contingent
upon the production of menace leads Pinter’s childhood friend Henry
Woolf to heartily quip that “Pinter doesn’t work as a menacing
playwright unless he’s funny… It’s only really menacing if it’s really
(Re)Thinking Harold Pinter’s Comedy of Menace 49
funny” (Hollis Merritt 126). Woolf’s statement requires adjustment
when turning to Pinter’s political plays. In such a context, perhaps
Woolf’s remark might then be re-formulated as such: It’s only really
menacing if the sociopaths, ideologues, perpetrators of evil, and the
morally bankrupt think it is funny. While I fully realize the intellectual
peril of suggesting that Pinter’s political plays are comedies of
menace, I stand by the aesthetic fact that they possess and exude
tendencies of the comedy of menace and can be tentatively wedded by
sighting family resemblances in the way that games, jokes, and at
times the characters’ own amusement or laughter function. My more
general aim in troubling the will to periodization and thus dialoguing
Pinter’s “distant” aesthetic past with his more recent past is to suggest
how a definition and a concept such as comedy of menace need not be
seen as monolithic and static. It is, rather, ever-expandable and open,
and can thus be continually developed as a critical tool for engaging
with Pinter’s oeuvre.
Basil Chiasson, The University of Leeds
Notes
1 One other possible irony is the fact that Pinter himself has variously expressed
scepticism of categories and labels. And it is arguable that this very scepticism is
indirectly realized in the many dynamic and resilient characters featured in the plays,
who find themselves confined in and oppressed by various places, individuals, and
structures.
2 For a thorough investigation of the Pinter pause’s performative characteristics and
functions, and of Pinter’s dramatic language more generally, see Quigley’s The Pinter
Problem.
3 Although I have lifted this appraisal from its specific context and reference to
Pinter’s screenplay The Quiller Memorandum (1965), I suggest that it nonetheless
applies to the plays.
4 In the context of his own drama, Howard Barker observes: “There is silence and
silence. Like the colour black, there are colours within silence” (17). I understand this
observation to hold for the dramatic pause, especially as Pinter employs it.
5 This aesthetic in particular is by no means the rule, as Alice Rayner’s reading of
Pinter’s Betrayal indicates: “The obvious temporal reversal of events in Betrayal lifts
the play out of the imitation of real time and places it in a fictional chronology in
which imagination, memory, and art turn moments of time into form and deliver an
artefact that can be examined from all sides. Pinter’s device is a means of bringing
cause and effect into the same room, as it were, but confounds temporal sequence: it
underlines the constructed nature of any recapitulation of ‘original’ events” [emphasis
mine (484)].
50 Basil Chiasson
6 In a cross-medium analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt and Pinter’s
The Birthday Party, Alan Brody illustrates how “The outer shell of The Birthday
Party is identical to a Hitchcock thriller” (163), and while doing so observes how
Goldberg and McCann “are ‘reconstituted’ types from the old Music Hall stage”
(172).
7 In quoting Deleuze, I am lifting him from another context in which he engages with
Francis Bacon’s painting, its manipulation of cliché, and its aesthetic of asignification.
Cf. Modern painting, which, according to Deleuze, embraces “counter-representation
as its guiding ambition. Modern painting simply pushes the refusal of representation
to its limit. It dismantles the order of cliché, and with it the creatural (organic,
narrative, figurative…) order as a whole” (Francis Bacon 111). Also, as an aesthetic
development of The Dumb Waiter, consider how The Homecoming’s invocation and
then effective manipulation of cliché is an effective illustration of the catastrophic
disruption of the clichéd of which Deleuze speaks. On this matter, see Andrew
Kennedy who speaks of Pinter’s “determination to avoid cliché and self-repetition”
(173), often by means of establishing “patterns of ceremony,” “ritualized language”
and “sentimental clichés” (185) -- only to violate them through “counter-images” and
“elaborately patterned, and comically violent, speech” (186). See also Kennedy's
discussion of Pinter’s “mannerism,” “various exploitations,” “paracitical” aesthetic
moves (172-173), and “infolding of language” (190-191).
8 On this point, consider how The Caretaker and a number of other plays begin with
openings where audiences are introduced to empty or peopled stages that are silent,
and thus loom large until a comic gesture of some sort finally interrupts and then
punctuates the imposing and at times unbearable atmospheres they inhabit. Motions to
laughter can in fact be regarded as surreptitious provocations of audience emotion,
used to intensify a spectator’s vulnerability to menacing moments. Of The Caretaker,
Arnold Dukore curiously suggests that “In a silent, prologue-like scene that opens the
play, Mick, alone, slowly surveying a room filled with junk, observes each object in
it, then sits still. Upon hearing the muffled voices of his brother and Davies, he
quickly departs. Anticipatory, the scene is neither comic nor noncomic” (25). Against
this, I would suggest that there is scarcely a moment in any Pinter play that is “neither
comic nor noncomic,” and thus devoid of signifiers that invite at least some sort of
audience response.
9 I am here borrowing Barbara Kennedy’s language, from her discussions in the
context of cinema, and doing so without, I am confident, introducing alterations that
might be problematic in moving from one medium to another. Of the cinematic
experience, Kennedy states: “what emerged was an interesting development away
from the politics of representation, to a concern with how the visual experience of the
cinematic encounter impinges upon the materiality of the viewer, and how affect and
sensation are part of that material engagement. By materiality I mean the biological,
molecular and material nature of the body and the perceptions within the brain/mind
of that body. The concept materiality is not here used in the Marxist sense of the term.
The term ‘body’ is also differently conceived to mean more than just the flesh and
blood corporeal body” (16).
10 CF. Andrew Kennedy: “Not only is the dialogue ‘idiomatic,’ it is saturated with
idioms ‘played’ to show up their idiocy” (167).
11 Cf. Diamond, who states that “Comic action and character are Pinter’s means of
structuring his plays and of controlling audience response to them” (12-13); “Yoking
metaphysical terror to comic character and action, Pinter affords us access to his plays
(Re)Thinking Harold Pinter’s Comedy of Menace 51
-- even as he revises the conventional uses of comedy” (11); “If Harold Pinter’s
comedy springs from traditional roots, he undercuts our laughter even as he invites it”
(12); and, most relevant to Coppa’s position, “Pinter’s audiences leave the theater
haunted by their own laughter. As problematic as the unexplained anxieties of Pinter’s
characters is the comic response such anxiety provokes” (11).
12 To be clear, I am not suggesting that Pinter’s plays demonstrate criteria sufficient to
the “old” category of comedy in particular, for, in addition to other elements that
make for classical-based comedy, they do not provide us with comfortable endings,
those in which all problems are reconciled by the time the curtain falls. The case is
quite the opposite in fact. As I hope has been evident, I am focussing on the
production of humor.
13 I am most grateful to Mark Taylor-Batty for offering, in conversation, this last
thought, which is clearly a poignant development of my argument.
14 I am employing both pronouns so as to account for interpretations of the play that
cast a female actor in the role of Nicolas.
15 For those in doubt as to the play’s comedic aspects or, moreover, the importance of
humor in it, consider the following: “New York director Carey Perloff would report to
the conference participants that Pinter did not consider American productions of his
plays funny enough, and she shared her own discovery that juxtaposing The Birthday
Party with Mountain Language brought out an unexpected humor in the latter,
certainly one of Pinter’s harshest plays” (Garner 53).
16 The spectators’ potential as a force acting upon what transpires on stage is an
important aspect of this discussion which, for lack of space, I am admittedly passing
over. However, for discussions that follow this line, particularly concerning audience
“impact” on actors, see Bert O. States’s Great Reckonings in Little Rooms.
17 Although I am not addressing it here, I suggest that when performed, a play such as
Ashes to Ashes can elicit more audience laughter than one might expect at first glance,
laughter which, according to my argument for comedy and menace’s existential
relationship, is instrumental to the play’s overall engenderment of affect. Consider
also Celebration, which, I have discovered, has even been referred to as a comedy of
menace: “I had had the good fortune to attend a reading, by a particularly glittering
cast, of Pinter’s short play Celebration as part of the Gate Theatre’s own celebration
of Pinter’s 75th birthday. The play was funny and disturbing in equal measure,
perfectly expressing the ‘comedy of menace’ that now defines the Pinteresque;” See
Heath.
Bibliography
Primary Texts
Pinter, Harold. The Dumb Waiter in Harold Pinter: Plays 1. [1960]
London: Faber and Faber, 1991.
_____. The Birthday Party in Harold Pinter: Plays 1. [1960] London:
Faber and Faber, 1991.
52 Basil Chiasson
_____. The Room in Harold Pinter: Plays 1. [1960] London: Faber
and Faber, 1991.
_____. The Collection in Harold Pinter: Plays 2. [1963] London:
Faber and Faber, 1996.
_____. Mountain Language in Harold Pinter: Plays 4. [1988]
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_____. One for the Road in Harold Pinter: Plays 4. [1984] London:
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_____. The Homecoming in Harold Pinter: Plays 3. [1965] London:
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_____. Party Time and The New World Order: Two Plays. [1991]
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