What is Comedy of Menace?

Literal meaning of menace means

person or thing likely to cause serious harm. Here we deeply understand that
what is the meaning of comedy of menace and how it is related with the play.
Menace (a threat or the act of threatening)
A menace is something which threatens to cause harm, evil or injury; which doesnt
seem like a logical idea to fit with comedy.
Violence and menace are mostly below the surface of the play. Mick moves swiftly and
silently and is an unpredictable character.
The playwrights objective in mixing comedy & the threat of menace is to produce certain
effects (like set up dramatic tension or make the audience think a character is a weasel
because they are acting nice or funny, but planning to do something evil) or to convey
certain social or political ideas to the audience. (eliteratysociety.com, 2011)
The phrase comedy of menace as a standalone description inspires both
positive and negative feelings. Title comedy of menace immediately brings
contradictions to mind because comedy is generally something that makes
people laugh. The word menace implies something threatening; this phrase
involves laughing at an ominous situation.
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 Camptons play: The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace, in
reviewing Pinters and Camptons plays in Encore in 1958.
Irving Wardle used comedy of menace in a review of several of Pinters
work.
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 mannersmenace being manners pronounced with somewhat of a
Judeo-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 Pinter as one of 'several playwrights who have been tentatively lumped together as the "non-
naturalists" or "abstractionists" ' (28)" (Merritt 225). 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
at the time, yet he speculates on the basis of "descriptions of other plays, 'The Room' and 'The
Dumb Waiter', is a writer dogged by one imagethe 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 waynot 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 jokeis an apt dramatic motif for an age of
conditioned behaviour in which orthodox man is a willing collaborator in his own destruction"
(Wardle, "Comedy of Menace" 33; rpt. in The Encore Reader 91). "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" ("There's Music" 130, as qtd. in Merritt 22526). 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 said that '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 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 . I
never stuck categories on myself, or on any of us . 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" (Gussow, Conversations with Pinter 18, 24).
The expression was first used by critic Irving Wardle in a review of Pinters The Birthday Party entitled
Comedy of Menace, published in 1958 in the Magazine Encore4. In this article, Wardle offered a
specific thematic and aesthetic definition of the genre. The thematic criterion was based on the motif
of the malevolent intrusion, a motif he in fact rejected in a 1960 review of The Caretaker. Pinters
plays indeed rely on a constant overlapping of comedy and menace inviting the readers and audience
to perceive these antagonistic elements at once, viewing them through what critic Albert Bermel calls
the red filter of amusement and the blue filter of suffering (4).

The phrase
and its corresponding dramatic aesthetic derives from David
Camptons 1958 play The Lunatic View, whose subtitle characterized
the play as A Comedy of Menace. Yet, despite comedy of menace
being Camptons birthright, it was theater reviewer Irving Wardle
who linked the phrase to Pinter in his glowing appraisal of the
authors 1958 play The Birthday Party.

however, that Wardles assertion that Pinter delivers all things

menacing in joke form gives short shrift to Pinters aestheticization of
comedy. Wardle inspired a way of speaking about Pinters 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

Pinter himself once insisted that Menace is everywhere. There is

plenty of menace in this very room, at this very moment, you know.
You cant avoid it; you cant get away from it. 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 Pinters plays. Although its function
throughout the playwrights 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 authors) desire or
capacity to convey information.

The Pinter pauses lack of lexical

content is precisely what makes the device inextricable from and
(Re)Thinking Harold Pinters Comedy of Menace. 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 Pinters
world it is impossible to detach what is said from the way in which it
is said (Wardle 30).