Comedy of menace refers to plays that combine elements of comedy and tragedy to produce unease in the audience. It originated from a play by David Campton and was used to describe early works by Harold Pinter. Comedy of menace uses everyday settings and situations but creates an atmosphere of threat through implied or actual violence, uncertainty, and the juxtaposition of comedy and seriousness. It reflects the human predicament of living in an indifferent world surrounded by the unknown. Pinter's plays exemplify this technique through subtle menaces, cryptic dialogue, and the withholding of key information from the audience.

1. Comedy of menace
• Comedy of menace is a term used to describe the
plays of David Campton and Harold Pinter by
drama critic Irving Wardle
• borrowed from the subtitle of Campton's play
The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace
• "Comedy of menace" and "comedies 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.

2. What is comedy of menace?
• the comedy of menace is a tragedy with a
number of comic elements.
• –it is a comedy, which also produces an
overwhelming tragic effect. Throughout the play
we are kept amused and yet throughout the play
we find ourselves also on the brink of terror.
• Some indefinable and vague fear keeps our
nerves on an edge.
• We feel uneasy all the time even when we are
laughing or smiling with amusement. This dual
quality gives to the play a unique character.

3. • The menace evolves from actual violence in the
play or from an underlying sense of violence
throughout the play.
• It may develop from a feeling of uncertainty 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 impending danger/fear.
• This feeling of menace establishes a strong
connection between character’s predicament
and audience’s personal anxieties.

4. • Pinter’s own comment:
• "more often than not the speech only
seems to be funny - the man in question
is actually fighting a battle for his life".

5. Pinter Pause
• 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”.

6. There are two silences
I. One when no word is spoken.
II. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being
employed.
Pinter once said in an interview: “We have heard many
times that tired, grimy phrase: 'failure of
communication' … and this phrase 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.

7. 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? (read news – 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 (verbal / physical?) in the play confirm this
and leave the audience unsure of what will come next.
Illustrations from the text? (interrogation scene)

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

9. The general setting
• 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 trivial 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.
• e.g. The "sitting down" sequence - funny but
threatening.

10. Reverse dramatic irony
• :In traditional dramatic irony, the audience
knows what the actors don't. In Pinter the
characters have secrets we never discover.
(Illustrations form the text – all characters
hide some facts from audience)

11. 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
world.
• At the end of the play in Act III, Petey is
tongue-tied and silent, his emotions and
thoughts remain unexpressed and bottled up.

12. • Pinter said: "Everything is funny until the
horror of the human situation rises to the
surface! Life is funny because it is based on
illusions and self-deceptions, like Stanley’s
dream of a world tour as a pianist, because it
is built out of pretence. In our present-day
world, everything is uncertain, there is no
fixed point, and we are surrounded by the
unknown. This unknown occurs in my plays.
There is a kind of horror about and I think that
this horror and absurdity (comedy) go
together."

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