AS 'COMEDY OF MANNER'
Once asked what his plays are about, Pinter lobbed back a phrase "the weasel under the cocktail cabinet", which he regrets has been taken seriously and applied in popular criticism. Despite Pinter's protestations to the contrary, many reviewers and other critics still find that Pinter's "remark", though "facetious"(teasing), is still an apt description of his plays. Now the Phrase "comedy of menace" is often applied to it and suggests that although they are funny, they are also frightening or menacing in a vague and undefined way. Even as they laugh, the audience is unsettled, ill at ease and uncomfortable. Pinter?s own comment clarifies it:
"more often than not the speech only seems to be funny - the man in question is actually fighting a battle for his life".
(What situations appear funny to us? But in fact for the character concerned is a terrifying experience.)
Now the question arises that does Pinter?s work really go in accordance to the ?comedy of manners. A critic says:
"Pinter restored theatre to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretence crumbles. With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution. Pinter's drama was first perceived as a variation of absurd theatre, but has later more aptly been characterized as 'comedy of menace,' a genre where the writer allows us to eavesdrop (spy) on the play of domination and submission hidden in the most mundane of conversations. In a typical Pinter play we meet people defending themselves against intrusion or their own impulses by establishing themselves in a reduced and controlled existence. Another principal theme is the unpredictability and elusiveness (ambiguity) of the past."
The general setting of 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.
Another technique that Pinter uses to create an atmosphere of menace is to cast doubt on almost everything in the play. One method of doing this is to have a character give a clear and definite statement and then have him flatly deny it later on.
created the play as a comedy, showing how the world might be in the times of the
“A dramatistic explaination appears in terms that performers can comfortably employ in their efforts to stage events” (Pelias and Shaffer 62). This means that the process for understanding text in an aethestic manor needs to be simple and understandable to the performer so it can be clearly related to the audience. So, for the process to be effective it has to be true to reality, otherwise the message of the text will be lost. Pelias and Shaffer describe the questions in Burke’s Pentad as “fundamental of all human action” (62). The simplicity and familiarity of the concepts are comfortable for even the most inexperienced performer.
One of the great, important themes is the importance of self-expression. Throughout the play the narrator is told to stay in her room, by her husband, to hide her depression from the world. She is forced to act like her marriage is perfect and that she is delighted, while in reality she is not. As the days pass she stares at this yellow wallpaper in this room
In Alain de Botton’s book, Status Anxiety, he argues that the aim of humorists is not solely entertainment, but also to convey a message that isn’t always okay to state directly. There are many places where his argument can apply. Even with humor, some topics are still too controversial to joke about; However, in most cases, humor can lighten things up and make it easier to discuss topics that otherwise would not be as easy to talk about without heavy arguments. There are many cases that would make his argument true. There are many examples that support his argument, and that help to show the importance of humor in arguing, including cartoons, comics, works of literature, and also when thinking of hosts of television programs.
...erpreted as dark and significant to the period. The comedy Wilde achieves is at the expense of the characters who are seemingly intelligent adding to the ironic structure that much of the comedy is based on. Many of the comic elements of the play are shown through human reactions to Victorian repression and the effect it has on the men and women of the time. Love seems to be nonexistent within the finds of the fierce and brutal Aristocracy when so many of the qualities they value are not based on human qualities but that of the class’s social norms. Wildes Characters are at often times not subtle about their distaste in marriage and love, Algernon is no exception to this “In aried lie, three is company, two is none” showing that they all have distorted views on many of the social practices that make them morally sound, thus adding to the satire elements of the play.
Thoughtful laughter is a technique used frequently in satirical pieces in literature. It allows for the audience to enjoy the wittiness of a work, later ponder on the meaning, and then apply the message to reality. Thoughtful laughter is often an inner experience that can only be achieved by authors who write meticulously. Two examples of satirical works in literature that display this concept explicitly are Voltaire’s Candide and C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. Both authors explore the depths of satire and simultaneously deliver an important message to readers through skillful technique.
General Douglas MacArthur uses pathos in his speech. To give gratitude to the soldiers have been fighting beside him and to those who has devoted their life on the battlefield, he told the audience how some of his brothers died uncomplaining with honor and glory in their hearts. Such words have the ability to arise American's appreciation along with sympathy. How some people will devote their life for the love of their country is, indeed, something that is truly affecting.
Conflict with reality and appearance brings to surface the elements of the traditional commedia dell’arte in the form of mistaken identity, which enriches the farcical plot-lines that occur in the play. The very embodiment of mistaken identity establishes that what may be seem real could be quite the opposite, however the characters in the play are unable to distinguish this as their vision becomes distorted by their fall into the deception of appearance. It is this very comedic device that enables the conflict between Roscoe (Rachel) and Alan, or Charlie and Alan’s father to occur which is a significant part of the comedic nature of the play as the unproportional situation is what sparks laughter from the audience, and so it is the presence of mistaken identity alone that conveys the play into a light-hearted comedy. Furthermore, Peter O'Neill quotes that ‘using humour can provide a degree of safety for expressing difficult ideas or opinions which could be particularly effective…’. In the circumstances of the quotation Richard Bean effectively c...
On “The Importance Of Being Earnest”, Act II lines 1324 to 1446 the sources of humor of these passage are the satirization of the Victorian era norms, violations against common sense, mockery of love and delusion. All of these humorous source are provided by the extravagant author Oscar Wilde in the short passage of 122 lines.
The play defies easy definition and various critics have labeled it variously as absurdist, existentialist, comical, burlesque, metaphorical or grim. The playwright on the other hand maintained that all through the creation of his work he strove to bring in the comic element and any tragedy that seems part of the play, may have crept in inadvertently and whenever it has been staged as a serious play, audience reaction to it has been cold.
Elin Diamond defines "Gestus" as "a moment in performance that makes visible the contradictory interactions of text, theater apparatus, and contemporary social struggle." (Diamond 519) Gestus makes it clear that the apparatus is doing something else entirely. "The term "apparatus" draws together several related aspects in theater production: the hierarchy of economic control, the material features of machinery and properties, and, more elusively, the social and psychological interplay between stage and audience." (Diamond521) Society works in certain ways to try and tell us what is normal. In this theoretical essay, Diamond suggests that there is a contradiction within the play that portrays women as having free choice, which in this time,
The playwright uses different images and symbols as developed by female actors to ease his communication on various circumstances that drew the Denmark community backwards. In his play, he uses the Denmark society as the setting so as to
Though each of the above works varies in the degree of satire employed, the pattern among them accentuates how satire can best be understood not only as a lens of criticism, but also in captivating the audience into considering their own role in the criticism. Often times, as has been shown, the authors’ utilize the end-states of protagonists to emphasize critique made throughout the literary work. Yet, the degree of ambiguity serves to engage the audience, which leads to a greater effectiveness of the satire. Therefore, returning to Swift’s quote on satire, the most effective satires not only allow for beholders to discover everybody else’s face, but through degrees of ambiguity, they also are able to discover their own.
funny parts of the play by creating confusion within characters and lowering the intensity of the
Pinter equates silence with language.silence for pinter speaks sometimes louder than the actual words that come from the mouth of a character,especially in the early plays.the choice of the two plays is not , however,arbitrary.both are one-act plays that have three characters only:a man,a woman,and an intruder who comes from outside to bring disaster.in both plays the setting is a small room in a big house.besides,in both plays the main character goes blind,a symbolic act open to several interpretations.