This paper aims to rethink Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter as a ”Comedy of Menace.” For many years critics' analyses of this drama tend to be lopsided in that they address the menace portion much more than the comedy part. In fact, Pinter expertly and evenly applies his dramaturgy in mixing the comical (recalling the music hall comedy) and the mysterious (recalling the whodunit). Pinter started playwriting in 1957 amid a host of ”Angry Young Men,” including John Braine, John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe, etc. Though the works of all of them had little in common with each other, they generally expressed anti-Establishment sentiments. Compared with Pinter, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, however, these contemporaries have paled into limited significance chiefly due to the inadequacy of their technique. What makes Pinter outshine them consists mainly in his ”Pinteresque” style, a label that has long passed into common use as a byword and a technique that makes the what (content) and the how (technique) of this play as inseparable as two sides of a coin.
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