Intruduction 3 Chapter I. Harold Pinter: The dramatist and his world 5

1.2 The sacred joke: comedy and politics in Pinter’s early plays
In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud explains that three people are required for the successful telling of a tendentious or purposeful
joke. ‘[In] addition to the one who makes the joke, there must be a second who is taken as the object of the hostile or sexual aggressiveness, and a third in whom the joke’s aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled.’1 In other words, jokes are constructed like theatrical events, and are verbalised for the purpose of pleasing or impressing an audience. If this were not the case, there would be no point in saying the joke aloud: the joke-maker could simply think his amusing thoughts for his own pleasure. The fact that the joke-maker goes to the effort of actually telling the joke shows that he is not the primary receiver of pleasure, that the joke is being told for the purpose of creating a relationship with someone else.
Thus the public telling of a joke creates recognisable positions: the aggressor, the victim and the audience. Furthermore, the act of telling a joke forces everyone within earshot to become a part of the event: there is no neutral position. To be within earshot is to be involved: merely to listen to a joke is to declare oneself one way or the other, to be compromised. The third party, the audience, is forced to take sides in the conflict between the joke-teller and the victim: to laugh is to ally oneself with the aggressor, to refuse to laugh is to ally oneself with the victim. Comedy thus functions as a sort of litmus test for the audience. Will they laugh or not laugh? With whom will they side? Freud’s joke-theory provides a useful key to Harold Pinter’s early plays, which were labelled comedies of menace by the theatre critic Irving Wardle. The early plays are in fact structured like Freud’s tendentious jokes. Pinter’s
plays tend to feature triangulated relationships: as Christopher Innes notes, Pinter’s typical cast is three, ‘the smallest unstable relationship in which changing alliances can be formed and individuals isolated’. Innes further notes that Pinter’s plays are ‘variations on the subjects of dominance, control, exploitation, subjugation and victimisation. They are models of power structures.’ 3 So, too, do tendentious jokes model power structures; so, too, do jokes illustrate dominance and subjugation. Jokes, like Pinter’s plays, create moments of theatrical and dramatic crisis which reveal previously invisible alliances and antagonisms. It is therefore unsurprising that Pinter’s work has been most easily understood by comic playwrights and farceurs. Writers such as Noel Coward, Joe Orton and Simon Gray understood Pinter’s dramatic project most immediately and instinctively. Similarly, critics have tended to group Pinter with comic playwrights – witness Kenneth Tynan’s famous assessment that the playwrights of his time fell into two categories: ‘the hairy men – heated, embattled, socially committed playwrights, like John Osborne, John Arden, and Arnold Wesker’ and ‘the smooth men – cool, apolitical stylists, like Harold Pinter, the late Joe Orton, Christopher Hampton, Alan Ayckbourn, Simon Gray, and [Tom] Stoppard’. Certainly Pinter’s high-level comedic technique puts him on a par with any of the great comic writers. The early plays are often deliberately funny; many of the exchanges within them are structured with the strutting rhythm of polished comedy routines. Consider the opening of The Dumb Waiter:
ben: Kaw!
He picks up the paper.
What about this? Listen to this!
He refers to the paper.
A man of eighty-seven wanted to cross the road. But there was a lot of traffic, see? He couldn’t see how he was going to squeeze through. So he crawled under a lorry.
gus: He what?
ben: He crawled under a lorry. A stationary lorry.
gus: No!
ben: The lorry started and ran over him.
gus: Go on!
ben: That’s what it says here.
gus: Get away!
ben: It’s enough to make you want to puke, isn’t it?
gus: Who advised him to do a thing like that?
ben: A man of eighty-seven crawling under a lorry!
gus: It’s unbelievable.
ben: It’s down here in black and white.
gus: Incredible.5
The timing of this section makes the story a blackly humorous tall tale, and the ‘man of eighty-seven’ recalls both the ‘man who walks into a bar’ and ‘the chicken that crosses the road’. Pinter invokes that notorious comedic chicken more overtly in the interrogation scene in The Birthday Party: ‘Why did the f chicken cross the road?’ is one of the unanswerable questions Goldberg and McCann pose to the beleaguered StanleyWebber. Pinter also skilfully uses comic devices such as repetition (Meg’s repeated use of theword ‘nice’ in The Birthday Party’s opening scene), repartee (Mr and Mrs Sands’s comic argument over whether or not she saw a star in The Room), and physical farce (Gus and Ben’s frantic interactions with the dumb waiter in that play), just to name a few. But Pinter’s skilful use of comedy is not incidental or merely pleasurable but rather crucial: the comedy routines in the early plays are maps to the themes and meanings of the plays as a whole. In an early book on George Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton noted that ‘amid the blinding jewelry of a million jokes’ one could generally ‘discover the grave, solemn and sacred joke for which the play was written’.6 Pinter’s works also tend to have identifiable ‘sacred jokes’ which reproduce the larger play in microcosm: Pinter uses the tendentious joke structure on the micro level as well as the macro. We may not, in the final event, find the larger work funny, but that does not mean that the play is not constructed like a joke. Rather, our failure to laugh may be an indication that we, the audience, have come to side (or have been taught to side) with the victim over the victimiser.
Consider, again, the opening joke of The Dumb Waiter as quoted above. Gus and Ben are hitmen, waiting for their targeted victim to appear. Throughout the play, Ben passes the time by reading stories out of the newspaper. In his essay, ‘Mindless Men’, Robert Gordon claims that Ben’s choice of stories is random, revealing the randomness of Pinter’s universe: ‘His [Ben’s] eyes passed over the page, probably, and happened to stop where they did – perhaps because a bit of dust, swept up when Gus walked in, dropped under Ben’s eyelid.’7 Gordon argues that there had to have been more ‘notable’ stories in that day’s paper than the ones Ben quotes to Gus; hence Ben is reading from the newspaper at random. But the stories Ben chooses to tell are not random. In the first instance, Ben is deliberately reading the stories aloud; like Freud’s joke-teller, he is making the effort to announce something he could well keep to himself, since people do generally read newspapers silently. The fact that Ben is taking on the work of reading aloud indicates that he is desiring a particular kind of reaction from Gus, and selecting articles that will produce such a reaction.
Secondly, the stories Ben chooses to tell all follow a very similar pattern. Ben picks out stories which illustrate the stupidity or cruelty of his fellow human beings. An eighty-seven-year-old man wants to cross the street, crawls under a lorry and is killed. The correct response to the story is, ‘What an idiot!’ In other words, the joke is certainly on him, the little old man. Freud’s joke-roles quickly fall into place: Ben, by telling the story, becomes the joke-teller; the old man is the object of the joke; Gus is the third party, the chicken cross the road?’ is one of the unanswerable questions Goldberg and McCann pose to the beleaguered StanleyWebber. Pinter also skilfully uses comic devices such as repetition (Meg’s repeated use of theword ‘nice’ in The Birthday Party’s opening scene), repartee (Mr and Mrs Sands’s comic argument over whether or not she saw a star in The Room), and physical farce (Gus and Ben’s frantic interactions with the dumb waiter in that play), just to name a few.
But Pinter’s skilful use of comedy is not incidental or merely pleasurable but rather crucial: the comedy routines in the early plays are maps to the themes and meanings of the plays as a whole. In an early book on George Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton noted that ‘amid the blinding jewelry of a million jokes’ one could generally ‘discover the grave, solemn and sacred joke for which the play was written’.Pinter’s works also tend to have identifiable ‘sacred jokes’ which reproduce the larger play in microcosm: Pinter uses the tendentious joke structure on the micro level as well as the macro. We may not, in the final event, find the larger work funny, but that does not mean that the play is not constructed like a joke. Rather, our failure to laugh may be an indication that we, the audience, have come to side (or have been taught to side) with the victim over the victimiser. Consider, again, the opening joke of The Dumb Waiter as quoted above. Gus and Ben are hitmen, waiting for their targeted victim to appear. Throughout the play, Ben passes the time by reading stories out of the newspaper. In his essay, ‘Mindless Men’, Robert Gordon claims that Ben’s choice of stories is random, revealing the randomness of Pinter’s universe: ‘His [Ben’s] eyes passed over the page, probably, and happened to stop where they did – perhaps because a bit of dust, swept up when Gus walked in, dropped under Ben’s eyelid.’7 Gordon argues that there had to have been more ‘notable’ stories in that day’s paper than the ones Ben quotes to Gus; hence Ben is reading from the newspaper at random. But the stories Ben chooses to tell are not random. In the first instance, Ben is deliberately reading the stories aloud; like Freud’s joke-teller, he is making the effort to announce something he could well keep to himself, since people
do generally read newspapers silently. The fact that Ben is taking on the work of reading aloud indicates that he is desiring a particular kind of reaction from Gus, and selecting articles that will produce such a reaction. Secondly, the stories Ben chooses to tell all follow a very similar pattern. Ben picks out stories which illustrate the stupidity or cruelty of his fellow human beings. An eighty-seven-year-old man wants to cross the street, crawls under a lorry and is killed. The correct response to the story is, ‘What an idiot!’ In other words, the joke is certainly on him, the little old man. Freud’s joke-roles quickly fall into place: Ben, by telling the story, becomes the joke-teller; the old man is the object of the joke; Gus is the third party, the audience member who is supposed to appreciate the story. And Gus makes an effort to appreciate the tale, reacting with encouragement (‘He what?’) and excited disbelief (‘Go on!’). The creation of an alliance between the joke-teller and the audience is the point of the exercise. ‘We’ are supposed to be laughing at ‘them’. Ben, the joke-maker, tells the joke at the expense of the old man, for the purpose of
bonding with Gus, whose role is to laugh. Their shared laughter over the story is also a confirmation of their shared ideology. After all, the subtext of Ben’s story is ‘Stupid people deserve what they get!’: this is presumably a comforting ideology for a hitman. You might need to believe that if you are going to kill effectively: yours is not to question why. Someone else has selected your victim, and presumably for good reason. People are stupid and cruel: they deserve whatever comes to them.
But right from the beginning of The Dumb Waiter, Gus is not properly filling his appointed role. After his first, correct, expressions of eagerness and interest, Gus then replies: ‘Who advised him to do a thing like that?’ This is very much the wrong response. By presuming that someone has improperly advised the old man, Gus shifts responsibility away from him, placing it instead on the shoulders of the hypothetical adviser whom Gus pictures lurking menacingly in the story’s shadows. The world is suddenly more complicated: perhaps the old man did not deserve to die, perhaps the old man was a victim to be pitied. Gus’s question begins to undermine the legitimacy of their entire enterprise as hitmen; presumably one cannot kill effectively if one thinks like this. The key problem of the play, the eventual split between Ben and Gus, is foreshadowed in the very first joke. Pinter repeats the joke a moment later with the newspaper story of the girl who kills a cat. By this point in the play, Gus is even less able to share in Ben’s world view:
ben: A child of eight killed a cat!
gus: Get away.
ben: It’s a fact. What about that, eh? A child of eight killing a cat!
gus: How did he do it?
ben: It was a girl.
gus: How did she do it?
ben: She –
He picks up the paper and studies it.
It doesn’t say.
gus: Why not?8
This time, Gus is even less encouraging; he doesn’t just prompt Ben, he questions the story. How did she do it? Why doesn’t the article say? Moreover, Gus actually goes so far as to argue the girl’s innocence, suggesting instead that she was framed by her eleven-year-old brother. By the end of the play, Pinter has trained us to see that the content of the joke-exchange is meaningless: what is important is the structure, and the alliances and antagonisms it reveals. Just before the end of the play, he trots out the joke one last time, this time utterly devoid of substance.