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Comedy of menace is the body of plays written by David Campton, Nigel Dennis, N. F. Simpson, and Harold Pinter.The term was coined by drama critic Irving Wardle, who borrowed it from the subtitle of Campton's play The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace, in reviewing Pinter's and Campton's plays in Encore in 1958.
Among the most-commonly cited of Pinter's comments on his own work are his remarks about two kinds of silence ("two silences"), including his objections to "that tired, grimy phrase 'failure of communication'," as defined in his speech to the National Student Drama Festival in Bristol in 1962, incorporated in his published version of the speech entitled "Writing for the Theatre":
The play has been classified as a comedy of menace, characterised by Pinteresque elements such as ambiguous identity, confusions of time and place, and dark political symbolism. Pinter began writing The Birthday Party in the summer of 1957 while touring in Doctor in the House. He later said: "I remember writing the big interrogation scene in a ...
The Room is Harold Pinter's first play, written and first produced in 1957. Considered by critics the earliest example of Pinter's "comedy of menace", this play has strong similarities to Pinter's second play, The Birthday Party, including features considered hallmarks of Pinter's early work and of the so-called Pinteresque: dialogue that is comically familiar and yet disturbingly unfamiliar ...
The term comedy of menace, which British drama critic Irving Wardle based on the subtitle of The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace (1958), by David Campton, is a jocular play-on-words derived from the "comedy of manners" (menace being manners pronounced with a somewhat Judeo-English accent). [3]
The subgenre became so prolific in the early ’90s that the Wayans brothers made a feature-length spoof, 1996’s Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood.
In New York State a person threatening another person with imminent injury without engaging in physical contact is called "menacing". A person who engages in that behavior is guilty of aggravated harassment in the second degree (a Class A misdemeanor; punishable with up to one year incarceration, probation for an extended time, and a permanent criminal record) when they threaten to cause ...
John Earl Haynes, Red Scare or Red Menace?: American Communism and Anti Communism in the Cold War Era. Ivan R. Dee, 2000. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. Cambridge, MA: Yale University Press, 2000.