The phrase “comedy of menace” creates mixed emotions as it involves laughing at a disturbing situation. Harold Pinter’s plays use humor to generate tension and alter opinions about characters. The plays have negative connotations and focus on communications between characters in a simplistic setting.
The phrase “comedy of menace” as a standalone description inspires both positive and negative sentiments. Comedy is used during a dangerous situation to cause the audience to make judgments about a particular character or communication. The words used are at the heart of often powerful stories that create mixed emotions in his audience. The title “Comedy of menace” immediately brings to mind contradictions, because comedy is generally something that makes you laugh, and the word “menace” implies something menacing. Literally, then, this phrase involves laughing at a disturbing situation.
This sentence is part of the title of a British play called The Lunatic View: a Comedy of Menace, by David Campton. Irving Ward, a critic in the 1950s, emphasized the phrase when he wrote a review of Harold Pinter’s plays. Ward used the “comedy of menace” in a review of several of Pinter’s works, even though he had only seen one at the time, The Birthday Party.
Some games are able to successfully mix drama with comedy. A specific example from The Birthday Party is a character joking about being in a threatening situation while cleaning his gun to deal with the threat. The goal of such works is to generate tension around the situation or to alter an audience’s opinions about a particular character; after all, someone joking while planning to shoot another person is generally not a trustworthy person.
Pinter himself has been quoted as saying that he was never able to write a happy play, and that a situation can be both true and false. To summarize his plays as comedies could be a misunderstanding; most critics have described his characters with negative connotations. By creating humor around a very dramatic or tense situation, the audience feels confused in the end, due to the range of emotions experienced.
Pinter’s menacing comedies have a rather simplistic setting; they might focus on one or two powerful images and are usually set in just one room. A powerful force that is not specifically defined for the audience threatens the characters in the plays. The audience focuses on the communications between the characters and generates the feeling and essence of the game from the conversations.
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