Comedy Of Menace Essay

COMEDY OF MENACE: FORMS OF REPRESENTATION

The term ‘comedy of menace’ is applied to a group of plays in which comedy is intertwined with elements of tragedy. The term was first used by David Campton as a subtitle of one of his plays, The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace. Though both comedy and tragedy are based on incongruities and contradictions, the driving force in comedy is humour and the driving force in tragedy is horror and menace. In comedy the humour is generated through dramatic techniques such as divergences, repetitiveness, surprise, illogical events and statements that often lead to outcomes which are quite contrary to what the audience expect and thereby cause laughter and amusement. In comedy of menace, two contradictory and

The same notion is expressed differently by Hazlitt in his essay “On Wit and Humour’’ in English Comic Writers (1819) “Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be .”

The incongruity between the ideal/unactual and the factual/actual causes both laughter and fear and that is what is the essence of comedy of menace. The comedy of menace also intends to project that appearances are deceptive and overtly comic situations or statements are actually tools of concealing the impending menace in life. The impact of such a comedy on the audience is that even as they laugh at the funny actions of the characters, they are unsettled, ill at ease and uncomfortable as they know that an unnamed menace will suddenly make its presence felt in the play. What makes the menace more alarming is that its origin and nature is unknown or vague and the audiences are able to correlate their private anxieties with the characters in the play. This is perhaps the most distinguishing feature of

(published in the September-October 1958 issue of Encore, 28-33). While reviewing Pinter’s plays, especially The Birthday Party, Irving Wardle