Comedy of menace

Comedy of menace

Name: Baraiya Bhavna P.

Roll No: 3

Sem: 3

Year: 2013-14

Submitted To:  Dr. Dilip Barad

                           Dpt. Of English

                           Bhavnagar Uni.

                               Here I am going to explain the term “ Comedy of menace ” in another words it calls “Dark comedy” In reference of Harold Pinter’s play. “ Birthday Party ”. Harold Pinter has also used  “Comedy of menace”  in his other plays such as “  The Room ” and “ A Slight Ache “.

                                If we see a word a  ‘menace’ then it means as a noun ‘A threatening quality’ or ‘a dangerous or troublesome person or thing’ and as a verb it calls ‘threaten’.

                                Comedy of menace it suggests that although they are funny, they are also frightening or menacing in a vague and undefined way.

                               Even as they taugh, the audience is unsettled, ill at ease and uncomfortable.

                               The term comedy of menace founded by Irving Wardle, he is drama critic. Then Comedy of menace is a term used to describethe play of David Compton and Harold Pinter. A term Comedy of menace is borrowed from the subtitle of Compton’s play ‘The Lunatic view: Acomedy of menace, in reviewing their plays in Encore in 1958. “Comedy of Menace”caught on and have been used generally in advertisements and in critical accounts, notices, and reviews to describe Pinter’s early plays and some of his later work as well.

                            If we talk about “The Birthday Party” as the comedy of menace, then it is a tragedy with a number of comic eliments – it is a comedy, which also produces an overwhelming tragic effect. Throughout the play we are kept amused and yet throughout the play we foind curselves also on brink of terror. Some indefinable and vague fear keeps our nerves on an edge.

                         When we are viewing the play we fell uneasy all the time even when we are laughing or smiling with amusement. This dual quality gives to the play a unique character.

Ø The menace evolves from actual violence in the play or from an underlying sense of violence throughout the play.

Ø It may develop from a feeling of uncertainity and insecurity. The audience may be made to feel that the security of the principal character, and even the audience’s own security, is threatened by some independing danger or fear.

Ø This feeling of menace establishes a strong connection between character’s predicament and audience’s personal enxieties.

Pinter’s own comment:

                                          “More often than not the speech only seems to be funny – the man in question actually fighting a battle for his life.”

-which situations appear funny to us?

-But in fact for the character concerned is a terrifying experience?

-Illustrations from the text? (blind man’s buff interrogation)

Progression – towards Pinteresque effect: Use of Pause

Pinter Pause:

                        One of “the silences”- when Pinter’s stage directions indicate pause and silence when his characters are not speaking at all – has become a “trademark” of Pinter’s dialogue and known as the “Pinter pause”.

Ther are two silences…

1)   One when no word is spoken.

2)   The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed.

                    This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it. That is it is continual reference. The speech we hear is an indication of that which we do not hear. It is a necessary avoidence, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its place. When true silence falls we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness. Pinter once said in interview:

                  “We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase: ‘failure of communication’… and this phras has been fixed to my work quite consistently. I believe the contrary. I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter in to some one else’s life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility. I am not suggesting that no character in a play can never say what he in fact means. Not at all I have found that there invariably does come a moment when this happens, when he says something, perhaps, which he has never said before. And where this happens, what he says is irrevocable, and can never be taken back”.

The atmosphere of menace:

                                                   The atmosphere of menace is also created by Pinter’s ability to drop suddenly from a high comic level to one of deep seriousness. Illustrations from the text? Cread news – about child birth, happy to feel nostalgic about piano show – remembrance of present state, interrogation, birthday party’s play – strangle/rape)

                       By this technique the audience is made aware that the comedy is only at surface layer. The sudden outbreaks of violence (verble/physical?) in the play confirm this and leave the audience unsure of what will come next. Illustrations from the text?  

Fear in the play:

                            There is fear in the play. Fear for what? Several things! By whom ? Just as Stanley (or Meg) is the main vehicle for comedy in the play, so is he main vehicle for the presentation of fear. Are other characters frightened? Illustration from the text?

                               (All the characters are suffering from the fear of unknown. Perhaps they laugh to forget their fear, they live in past or avoid to see in mirror-because of fear.

v     The room or house

                                  The room or house represents security from the outside world but sadly it is impossible to sustain. The menace in the form of Goldberg and McCann represents a hostile outside world. They are the exeption to the rule where life is normal and pleasant outside

v     The general setting

                                

                                                      The general setting of the play is naturalistic and mundane, involving no menace, However one of Pinter’s greatest skills is his ability to make an apparently normal and trival object, like a toy drum, appear strange and threatening. Pinter can summon forth an atmosphere of menace from ordinary everyday objects and events, and one way in which this is done is by combining two apparently opposed moods, such as terror and amusement. Much of Birthday Party is both frightening and funny. Stanley is destroyed by ‘a torrent of words, but mingled in with the serious accusations

E.g. “He’killed his wife”

        Are ones which are trivial and ludicrous.

v     Reverse dramatic irony:

                                         In traditional irony, the audience knows what the acters don’t. In Pinter the characters have secrets we never discover.

v     Conclusion:

                   Thus to conclude, we may say that the absurdity of the play which is represented through menacing effect has its own symbolic significance. It tries to explain the human predicament in this indifferent & hostile worled.   

Ø The menace evolves from actual violence in the play or from an underlying sense of violence throughout the play.z

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