Article

Name: Comedy of Menace as a Specific Kind of Absurdist Discourse (D. Campton, H. Pinter, D. Danilov)

Authors: Pavel E. Zhilichev

Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

Abstract:

This paper is devoted to the analysis of comedy of menace, investigating its discursive nature. The history of the term comedy of menace is being reviewed, including its origins, modern usage, and reception in theory of drama. Comedy of menace is identified by a set of consistent traits such as having a plot based on an intrusion of character’s interiorized space (i. e. their house or room) by some outward force; the discourse of menace (found in both the dialogues and stage directions); the usage of aposiopeses.

Based on the plays by British and Russian authors, this paper investigates the relations between the general principles of comedy of menace and individual creative variations of absurdist communication. Campton often explores the “material” side of menace, as his plays often intertwine catastrophic events of the plot with dark humor. Campton’s communicative strategy is to make the viewer or reader witness and overcome the collapse of “old” concepts and relations, embracing the absurdity of the world. The works of Pinter, on the contrary, do not necessarily represent the menace in the external action of a play, as any discursive interaction is viewed as potentially catastrophic (including the relationships between characters, between text and its recipient, between text and its intertext). Danilov’s plays deconstruct every major convention of comedy on the levels of characters, the world depicted, and metatext. The menace in his plays is metacommunicative rather than referential, as the recipient is meant to be “caught” into the “trap of interpretation”.

Keywords: absurd, comedy of menace, discursive strategy, Pinter, Campton, Danilov

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