Mentioning the acknowledged "literary influences" on Pinter's work—"Beckett, Kafka and American gangster films"—Wardle argues that " 'The Birthday Party' exemplifies the type of comic menace which gave rise to this article."
(225)[2]In "Comedy of Menace", as Merritt observes, on the basis of his experience of The Birthday Party and others' accounts of the other two plays, Wardle proposes that "Comedy enables the committed agents and victims of destruction to come on and off duty; to joke about the situation while oiling a revolver; to display absurd or endearing features behind their masks of implacable resolution; to meet … in paper hats for a game of blind man's buff"; he suggests how "menace" in Pinter's plays "stands for something more substantial: destiny," and that destiny, "handled in this way—not as an austere exercise in classicism, but as an incurable disease which one forgets about most of the time and whose lethal reminders may take the form of a joke—is an apt dramatic motif for an age of conditioned behaviour in which orthodox man is a willing collaborator in his own destruction" (Wardle, "Comedy of Menace" 33; rpt.
But if what I understand the word menace to mean is certain elements that I have employed in the past in the shape of a particular play, then I don't think it's worthy of much more exploration" (Gussow, Conversations with Pinter 18, 24).
In his second one-act play, The Dumb Waiter (1960), as accentuated through the 2008 film by Martin McDonagh closely resembling and markedly influenced by it, In Bruges, "Pinter conveys the idea of political terror through the staccato rhythms of music-hall cross-talk and the urban thriller: Hackney Empire cross-fertilises with Hemingway's The Killers [1927]" (Billington 90), one of Pinter's own acknowledged early influences, along with Franz Kafka (348–49); Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, such as William Shakespeare, John Webster, and Cyril Tourneur, whose work his schoolmaster Joseph Brearley had introduced to him; Samuel Beckett (mostly his novels [43]); and black-and-white American movies of the 1940s and 1950s.
[3] "A near-perfect play about the testiness of a collapsing partnership and the divide-and-rule tactics of authority," according to Billington, The Dumb Waiter focuses on two characters, Gus and Ben; Gus is "the man who questions the agreed system and who is ultimately destroyed by his quest for meaning"; Ben, "the man who blindly obeys orders and thereby places himself at risk.
The "punning title" of The Dumb Waiter, Billington observes, "carries several layers of meaning": "It obviously refers to the antique serving-hatch that despatches [sic] ever more grotesque orders for food to these bickering gunmen"—the dumbwaiter; "But it also applies to Gus, who, troubled by the nature of the mission [their next job as hitmen] to realise he is its chosen target; or, indeed to Ben, who, by his total obedience to a higher authority that forces him to eliminate his partner, exposes his own vulnerability" (89).
As Gus "dumbly" awaits his fate, he may be a subservient partner who awaits orders from the "senior partner" Ben, but Ben too is subservient to The Powers That Be, a contemporary variation on Deus ex machina, manipulating both the mechanical dumbwaiter and them through its increasingly extravagant and thus comically inconvenient "orders" for increasingly exotic dishes, unnerving both of them.
You can see it as a cry of protest against a whimsically cruel God who treats man as His plaything – even the twelve matches that are mysteriously pushed under the door have been invested with religious significance [by critics].
Ben and Gus are both victims of some unseen authority and a surrogate married couple quarrelling, testing, talking past each other and raking over old times.
(90)The comedy in this "comedy of menace" often derives from such arguments between Gus and Ben, especially the one that occurs when "Ben tells Gus to go and light the kettle," a "semantic nit-picking that is a standard part of music-hall comedy": "All the great stage and film double acts – Jewel and Warriss, Abbott and Costello – fall into this kind of verbal worrying in which the bullying 'male' straight man issues instructions which are questioned by the more literal-minded 'female' partner" — As Billington observes further, This kind of comic pedantry has precise echoes of the great Sid Field – ironically [since the city is the setting of this play] a Birmingham comic – who had a famous sketch in which he played a virgin of the greens being hectored by Jerry Desmonde's golf pro who would cry, in exasperation, 'When I say "Slowly Back" I don't mean "Slowly Back", I mean "Slowly Back."
… The pay-off comes when Gus, having dogmatically insisted that the accurate phrase is 'put on the kettle', suddenly finds an irritated Ben adopting the right usage.
(91)"Everything" in The Dumb Waiter, Billington observes, "contributes towards a necessary end"; for, "the image, as Pete says in [Pinter's only novel] The Dwarfs, stands in exact correspondence and relation to the idea" (91).
But 'menace' is hardly the word for The Caretaker, and still less for subsequent plays in which Pinter increasingly exchanged his derelict settings and down-and-out characters for environments of moneyed elegance (657–58).
(Jones)"Beyond the point" of the comedy (the "funny") lies the scary territory that threatens one's very existence (Billington 92), which Wardle and others commonly have "labeled" or "pigeonholed" (depending on one's perspective) as "menace" (Merritt 9–10).
As the "maître d'hôtel" emits platitudes geared to elevate the nouveaux riches in their own imagined esteem ("I believe the concept of this restaurant rests in that public house of my childhood" [Pinter, Celebration 371]), the "maîtress d'hôtel" appears to dwell on a peculiar past family and sex life (373–74), while the Waiter engages in "interjections" spinning fantasied impossible memories of a grandfather who knew writers, other artists, and various other public figures of multiple decades and geographical locations too far apart to have been experienced personally in one man's lifetime (367, 375).
This speech stressing "force" (in the repetitions of Enforcing) occurs after Russell has already revealed his own ilk: Lambert and Matt are distantly reminiscent of Gus and Ben from The Dumb Waiter; but distinctly less polite while living much higher on the hog.
One imagines such characters "strategically" plotting the "peaceful" rendition of others without any qualms while sipping Perrier and simultaneously planning their next wedding-anniversary dinner celebration (perhaps with a different set of wives) on their mobiles.
As the Waiter says in his apparently penultimate "interjection", in which one might detect intimations of mortality: Pinter mocks mobile phones comically in an ostensibly-trivial wireless conversation, while still suggesting a residual bit of menace in the unsaid, developed as his last revue sketch Apart From That (2006).