In his “Writing for Myself,” Pinter says, ‘I had a pretty good notion in my earlier plays of what would shut an audience up; not so much what would make them laugh; that I had no ideas about’. If we assume that Pinter is not simply being coy here, he certainly stumbled onto some effective ideas about ‘what would make them laugh’ early, and developed them into a whole brace of comic strategies as he went on. But Pinter goes on to say that his experience as an actor gave him a feeling ‘for speakable dialogue',¹ and much of what makes dialogue speakable and believable also makes it amusing. In fact, many of the strategies Pinter used most effectively to create humor revolve around the contradictions, non-sequiturs, and misunderstandings typical of everyday talk, as Deirdre Burton demonstrates convincingly. Familiar enough to us from the conversation we hear around us, these disfluencies become the stuff of comedy on stage, and no playwright has utilized them more ingeniously than Pinter.²

Precisely these comic devices built around the turn-by-turn organization of everyday talk in the early plays of Pinter make up the central concern of this paper. We hope to distinguish these strategies from the more usual play upon individual word forms we find in punning or the attention to their incongruent meanings we find in paradox or irony. Following Roman Jakobson in his definition of the metalingual function of language as directed at the code itself,³ Pinter's comic focus on the form of talk counts as metalingual humor. At times, the characters themselves focus their attention on language in comically revealing ways, but usually it is the playwright behind them who manipulates their speeches to comment on language without their awareness. We shall argue that this metalingual humor is characteristic for early Pinter, and try to draw some more general conclusions about his dramatic method on this basis. The following discussion of other recurrent humor strategies will serve primarily to set off this particular one rather than as an attempt at a complete catalogue of Pinter's comic devices.

There is, of course, no shortage of traditional humor in the plays of Pinter. We often find humor based on incongruency within the situations Pinter portrays. This situational humor runs high when the two killers began to receive orders for progressively more exotic foods from the serving hatch in The Dumb Waiter or when the men ‘turn against’ various products made in the factory in the revue sketch Trouble in the Works, and it may appear admixed with foreboding and anxiety, as when strangers arrive uninvited in The Room.

Similarly, a whole range of traditional language-based humor devices appear from the early plays onward. For instance, one finds a classical malapropism in A Night Out, where an old man at a coffee stall reports that he saw a young man ‘looking very compressed with himself’. This the barman feels obliged to explain, saying, ‘Depressed. He means depressed’.⁴ And Pinter is not above playing on the dual senses of up, meaning either ‘elevated’ or ‘awake’ to create apparent paradox in The Birthday Party.

MEG:
Is Stanley up yet?
PETEY:
I don't know. Is he?
MEG:
I don't know. I haven't seen him down yet.
PETEY:
Well then he can't be up.(5)

Again in The Room Rose says, ‘You're blind, aren't you? So what are you looking at?’⁶

Pinter also shows a particular fondness for technical terms which have a secondary sense suggestive of sexual organs or activities. In The Dumb Waiter Ben surmises that the toilet tank fills too slowly because ‘It's got a deficient ball-cock’.⁷ And in Trouble in the Works many of the offending products have richly evocative names like brass pet cock, bronzedraw off cock with handwheel, and high speed taper shank spiral flute reamers. At the beginning of A Slight Ache, the couple argue about the distribution of plants in their garden with names seemingly designed for double entendres, to wit honeysuckle and convolvulus. Finally, in keeping with the maxim that the old gags are the best gags, Pinter includes the following exchange in Night School.

MILLIE:
I had to lay off. I had to lay right off tarts, since just after Easter.
ANNIE:
I bet you never had a tart in prison, Wally.
WALLY:
No, I couldn't lay my hands on one.(8)

To the extent that word play reflects on language itself, it draws our attention to the system of words and their potentially clashing senses, and may thus count as metalingual. But these sorts of word play are the stock in trade of playwrights generally. What we want to identify as characteristic of Pinter's early plays in particular is humor built around the give and take of language in conversational interaction. And it is to this matter we now turn.

Austin Quigley argues that critics have failed to understand the use of language in Pinter's plays due to their traditional assumption that language is primarily referential in function, ideational in meaning. He cites Wittgenstein's contention that language has a multiplicity of functions realized in potentially infinite language games, then he critiques treatments of linguistic function like those by Richardson, Jakobson et alia, showing how they all ultimately fall victim to the belief that referentiality and ideation are primary. If we follow Wittgenstein in recognizing that meaning follows from use, we see that Pinter's characters use language to negotiate interpersonal relationships: of primary importance is not reference or ideational meaning in the traditional sense, but rather how the characters maneuver within—and against—the constraints of talk in interaction.⁹

All this meshes nicely with current trends in the study of discourse, particularly in conversation analysis, whether researchers express the constraints of talk in interaction in terms of ‘preferences’ for certain default responses or orders of turns, and inferences from unpreferred responses or orders, as do Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson and others; or whether they speak in terms of negotiating meaning within the parameters of power and solidarity, politeness and clarity, where any speech resonates interpersonally in line with expectations defined in cognitive frames, as in work by Goffman, Gumperz, Lakoff, Tannen.¹⁰

Of course, Quigley focusses on the interactional significance of talk exchanges between characters, but his discussion in The Pinter Problem (Princeton, 1975) also points the way for an investigation of Pinter's style, which we would like to get at here. Pinter's construction of dialogue around points of disagreement on ways of speaking provides Quigley with examples of the interrelational function of language, but, at the same time, it counts as metalingual in the sense of Jakobson.¹¹ And to the extent that it conduces to humor, it counts as metalingual humor for present purposes. Even Quigley himself goes on to identify two primary types of humor Pinter creates through the prism of language as an interrelational tool: first, ‘A great deal of humor in the plays is based on the characters’ need to confirm the status quo of their relationship by conversing after the manner of tennis practice’ (284). Second, ‘Pinter makes extensive use of another characteristic of language: its dependence on an axis of contrast’ (285). When systematic linguistic contrasts break down, misunderstanding results; and Pinter generates much humorous dialogue from these breakdowns and misunderstandings.

The ‘tennis practice’ nature of phatic small talk becomes its ‘smokescreen function’ for Arlene Sykes. Sykes in Harold Pinter (New York, 1970) makes the point—citing Pinter in interviews where he says we use talk as a smokescreen to avoid serious communication—that language in The Dumb Waiter provides an excuse not to discuss the impending threat. Arguing, as Elin Diamond does in Pinter's Comic Play, (Lewisburg, PA, 1985), that Pinter is parodying gangster talk does not help to explain his detailed interest in the minutiae of everyday small talk, an interest which goes far beyond that required for a simple parody of certain well-known conventions. Pinter's gangsters strike us as funny precisely because they get caught up in the trivialities of everyday talk about whether one lights the kettle or the gas; and it is this decidedly non-gangster talk which makes Pinter's style so much richer than straightforward parody. Pinter is perceptive about and sympathetic to our inability to communicate genuinely, and this comes through in his concern with empty dialogue—the games people play to avoid straight talk about their relationships and problems.

A parallel critique deserves to be leveled against the blanket claim that Pinter's humor derives from the music hall tradition. Even if his humor owes a great deal to this tradition, Pinter's attention to the realistic details of everyday talk remains to explain. Hence when Diamond assigns both Pinter and Beckett to the same music hall tradition,¹² she loses track of the enormous difference between Beckett's anti-naturalistic formalism and Pinter's detailed naturalism—a naturalism sensitive to false starts, repetitions, mishearings, interruptions, and non-sequiturs. In fact, Pinter's microscopic attention to patterns in everyday small talk awakens playgoers' (or readers') metalingual awareness of the talk they themselves engage in, often with a startling comic effect. As Sykes writes, ‘The paradox of most writing (certainly Pinter's) that attempts to show up the thinness and lack of meaning in jargon and cliche—that is, the heightening process … actually injects life into the language, so that it becomes itself larger-than-life, attention-catching, and often very amusing’ (85).

Recent research in discourse and conversation analysis is developing an increasingly detailed description of everyday talk; it has repeatedly demonstrated the cooperative, interactional nature of face-to-face conversation.¹³ Conversationalists must signal their attitudes toward the ongoing interaction and agree on mutual background assumptions, they must work out patterns of turn-taking, must constantly draw inferences about each others' intentions, definitions for words and phrases, and ways of speaking generally. When presuppositions are not shared, when one participant fails to draw the conclusion the other invites or draws the wrong conclusion, communication breaks down. In our real-life conversations, this makes us angry; but in exchanges between characters on stage, it makes us laugh. We apparently enjoy watching others flounder in a conversation where communication breaks down or where no significant information is exchanged at all—and this is precisely what Pinter offers in many cases.

A basic requirement of any attempt to engage in conversation beyond hello, how are you, and goodbye is that at least one of the participants has something worth saying. One of Grice's well-known conversational maxims states that every conversational contribution should be relevant at that point in the conversation where it occurs.¹⁴ Statements of generally recognized social or physical facts are particularly obvious violations of this maxim; Mrs. Sands manages to utter both kinds of non-information in the two following exchanges from The Room.

ROSE:
Clarissa? What a pretty name.
MRS. Sands:
Yes, it is nice, isn't it? My father and mother gave it to me.
MR. Sands:
You think you saw what?
MRS. Sands:
A star.
MR. Sands:
Where?
MR. Sands:
In the sky.(15)

In fact, Mr. and Mrs. Sands spend a lot of time arguing about irrelevant matters to great comic effect while on stage.

Repetitions of statements just made of course also count as irrelevant in the sense of Grice's maxim, but this is precisely what we find in the hilarious Last to go. Except for the turns relating to a certain George, almost everything either person says in this sketch is already known information for both, often because it amounts to repetition of what has gone before. Again the early review sketch Trouble in the Works contains eleven consecutive lines all involving repetitions of the words bronzedraw off cock with and without handwheel.

In parallel fashion, since tag questions generally serve to elicit a reply when none is immediately forthcoming, tag questions following a positive reply like those Gus and Ben use in The Dumb Waiter are superfluous and laughable.

GUS:
Well, they'll come in handy.
BEN:
Yes.
GUS:
Won't they?
BEN:
Yes, you're always running out, aren't you?
GUS:
All the time.
BEN:
Well, they'll come in handy then?
GUS:
Yes.
BEN:
Won't they?
GUS:
Yes, I could do with them. I could do with them too.
BEN:
You could, eh?
GUS:
Yes.

Ben's whole final utterance is supremely redundant as well, since it serves to elicit a positive response to a question Ben has just answered twice in the preceding turn.¹⁶

Let's turn now to the second category of language-based humor Quigley recognized in Pinter. Beyond his poking fun at empty talk in lieu of genuine communication, Pinter builds dialogue around breakdowns in the system of contrasts in language. Quigley concentrates on the interrelational significance of such breakdowns and the ensuing discussions characters have about them;¹⁷ but we are again more interested in Pinter's method of creating humorous sequences out of failures to make or recognize systematic linguistic distinctions. Now when distinctions break down, misunderstanding results, and Pinter regularly employs misunderstandings of all kinds for humor. Conversationalists may fail to communicate harmoniously for a number of reasons, from simple mishearing, through failure to recognize where the syntactic boundaries go, to a lack of shared background knowledge or failure to infer one another's intentions.

At the most basic level of acoustic perception, we find Pinter perfectly willing in The Room to put on stage a character like Mr. Kidd, who gets laughs because he is hard of hearing. Kidd's failure to hear properly causes the other characters to repeat themselves, which we have already seen to be funny because it creates redundancy. But Kidd is also slow to catch the drift of the conversation generally, which makes for even more humor.

ROSE:
It must get a bit damp downstairs.
KIDD:
Not as bad as upstairs.
ROSE:
What about downstairs?
KIDD:
Eh?
ROSE:
What about downstairs?
KIDD:
What about it?
ROSE:
Must get a bit damp.
KIDD:
A bit. Not as bad as upstairs though.(18)

Another old standby in conversational joking and stage humor built around misunderstanding consists in incorrectly analyzing and responding to the foregoing utterance. In The Birthday Party Pinter has Stanley analyze the adverbs first and just as part of what Meg asks him to say, rather than as words modifying the predicate.

MEG:
Do you want some tea? (Stanley reads the paper.) Say please.
STAN:
Please.
MEG:
Say sorry first.
STAN:
Sorry first.
MEG:
No. Just sorry.
STAN:
Just sorry.
MEG:
You deserve the strap.(19)

Thus Stanley abolishes a systematic contrast in Quigley's sense; at the same time, Pinter draws our attention to the code in itself, which counts as metalingual focus in Jakobson's sense.

A third sort of potentially comic misunderstanding arises in the use of deictic words like I, you, here, today, which change their reference depending on context and who is speaking. In The Dumb Waiter, during a longish passage where Ben leads Gus in a catechism of the steps to take once their victim appears, Gus fails to switch the reference—and hence maintain the relevant contrast—in the personal pronoun, resulting in a humorously botched repetition.

BEN:
But he'll see me.
GUS:
He'll see you.
BEN:
He won't know you're there.
GUS:
He won't know you're there.
BEN:
He won't know you're there.
GUS:
He won't know I'm there.(20)

Conversationalists must share certain background assumptions in order to proceed in their talk without constant misunderstandings and backtrackings. The relevant contrast here obtains at the level of the discourse between information presupposed and information actually stated.

The problem can become so obvious that the character who feels misunderstood will break off the exchange in exasperation; and this happens fairly frequently both in real conversation and in Pinter's plays. One good example comes from The Dumb Waiter, where Gus tries to ask Ben several related questions while Ben apparently shares neither Gus's concern with the gas nor his assumptions about the matches shoved under the door nor even his interest in the matter.

GUS:
Ben. Why did he send us matches if he knew there was no gas? Why did he do that?
BEN:
Who?
GUS:
Who sent us those matches?
BEN:
What are you talking about?
GUS:
Who is it upstairs?
BEN:
What's one thing to do with another?
GUS:
Who is it, though?
BEN:
What's one thing to do with another?
GUS:
I asked you a question.
BEN:
Enough!(21)

Since Ben does not make the same background assumptions Gus does, he cannot see the connections Gus is beginning to make, and he cannot answer the questions Gus asks.

The next passage from The Birthday Party works in much the same way. Stanley wants to change the topic and find out what Lulu knows about the house he stays in, but Lulu fails to understand his reasons for asking and responds to Stanley's questions with questions of her own which cast doubt on Stanley's assumptions about the house.

STAN:
Listen. I want to ask you something.
LULU:
You've just asked me.
STAN:
No. Listen. (Urgently.) Has Meg had many guests staying in this house, besides me, I mean before me?
LULU:
Besides you?
STAN:
Was she very busy, in the old days?
LULU:
Why should she be?
STAN:
What do you mean? This used to be a boarding house, didn't it?
LULU:
Did it?
STAN:
Didn't it?
LULU:
Did it?
STAN:
Didn't … oh, skip it.

Of course, such exchanges serve to show one character beginning to suspect trouble and to foreshadow the action to come, but as they are delivered, they elicit laughter from the audience.²²

Closely related to the foregoing examples where one character lacks the information or interest necessary to figure out what some other character is getting at are exchanges where the second character seems unable to draw the obvious inference the first intends. This occurs most clearly when a particular word or phrase receives no response at all, as in the next excerpt from The Birthday Party.

GOLDBERG:
Well? (McCann does not answer.) McCann. I asked you well.
MCCANN:
Well what?
GOLDBERG:
What's what? (McCann does not answer.) What is what?
MCCANN:
I'm not going up there again.

Now McCann may purposely refuse to respond appropriately to Goldberg's queries in order to avoid a confrontation, but the effect is the same. Goldberg's I asked you well is itself a wonderfully insightful comment on just how Well? is to be correctly understood as Goldberg intended.²³

Finally, and most characteristic of Pinter vis-a-vis other playwrights, including those often compared with him like Beckett and Ionesco, humor can arise from explicit talk about the form of talk itself. Here the metalingual focus of language identified by Jakobson looms largest. In an early example from The Room, Mrs. and Mr. Sands argue about the difference in meaning between the words sit and perch.

MRS. Sands:
You're sitting down!
MR. Sands:
(jumping up). Who is?
MRS. Sands:
You were.
MR. Sands:
Don't be silly. I perched.
MRS. Sands:
I saw you sit down.
MR. Sands:
You did not see me sit down because I did not sit bloody well down. I perched!
MRS. Sands:
Do you think I can't perceive when someone's sitting down?
MR. Sands:
Perceive! That's all you do. Perceive.(24)

According to Quigley, this sort of example shows how ‘the fluidity of language’ (287) can become the focus of conversation. At this point, we move from what Burton in Dialogue and Discourse (London, 1980) identified as the metalingual function in the macrocosm to the metalingual function in the microcosm of the literary work itself (184-85). That is to say that here not only Pinter and the audience focus on the form of talk, but the characters in the play themselves.

Another nice example of metalingual comment on word meaning comes in The Birthday Party when Meg reacts to Stanley's use of succulent. Meg seems to have her own special associations for succulent at odds with its dictionary meaning, so that her comments hearken back to the earlier discussion of Pinter's penchant for words like honeysuckle and convolvulus.

MEG:
Was it nice?
STAN:
What?
MEG:
The fried bread.
STAN:
Succulent.
MEG:
You shouldn't say that word.
STAN:
What word?
MEG:
That word you said.
STAN:
What, succulent—?
MEG:
Don't say it!
STAN:
What's the matter with it?
MEG:
You shouldn't say that word to a married woman.(25)

Meg refuses even to speak the offending word, which gives Stanley a chance to repeat it—with all the various comic possibilities we have identified so far.

The most intricate example of microcosmic metalingual humor in the plays of Pinter comes in The Dumb Waiter, when Ben and Gus argue about a whole set of phrases having to do with getting the range going to boil water for tea. Gus initially fails to understand the phrase light the kettle, apparently on logical grounds, so that one should say light the gas. The metalingual character of the discussion comes out most clearly in the following lines, where Ben defends his phrase as a figure of speech, and argues from common usage, while Gus insists simply that Ben is mistaken. The argument and the humor culminate in Ben's absolutely absurd claim that he has never heard anyone say put on the kettle.

GUS:
How can you light a kettle?
BEN:
It's a figure of speech. Light the kettle. It's a figure of speech.
GUS:
I've never heard it.
BEN:
Light the kettle! It's common usage!
GUS:
I think you've got it wrong.
BEN:
(Menacing.) What do you mean?
GUS:
They say put on the kettle.
BEN:
Who says?
They stare at each other, breathing hard.
(Deliberately.) I have never in all my life heard anyone say put on the kettle …

After several more lines of argument, Ben goes on the offensive, attacking Gus's phrase light the gas. In a delightful non-sequitur, Ben switches gas from the object of light to its subject, which thoroughly confounds Gus. Then just to be sure he wins the argument, Ben applies physical pressure.

BEN:
Nobody says light the gas! What does the gas light?
GUS:
What does the gas—?
BEN:
(grabbing him with two hands by the throat, at arm's length) THE KETTLE, YOU FOOL.
GUS:
All right, all right.

But even this does not completely end the argument, for a few lines later Ben says, ‘Put on the bloody kettle, for Christ's sake’. Which gets a rise from Gus, but no verbal response. Then several pages later, after listening to orders coming in through the speaking tube, Ben says, excitedly,

BEN:
Did you hear that?
GUS:
What?
BEN:
You know what he said? Light the kettle! Not put on the kettle! Not light the gas! But light the kettle!
GUS:
How can we light the kettle?
BEN:
What do you mean?
GUS:
There's no gas.

It is almost as if Ben were introducing Gus to field methods for analyzing the phraseology of English. Then just when it looks as if Gus is gearing up to start the argument all over again with his question How can we light the kettle?, it turns out that he was focussing on real-world problems rather than on linguistic ones.²⁶

In conclusion, most of the examples are from Pinter's early plays: much of his recent work has been increasingly preoccupied by external political considerations. Power struggles between people have been transformed into reflections upon political imprisonment and oppression, most noticeably in, for instance, Mountain Language (1988) in which ‘we see torture in action as sadistic soldiers terrorize both the women visiting their husbands and sons in prison, and the prisoners themselves suffering from beatings and menaced by the same soldiers’.²⁷ There is little comedy or comic in Mountain Language or in A Kind of Alaska (1982) with its deeply moving evocation of a search for the self and of dream states. Although soliloquies, monologues and brief dialogues are present in these plays, they lack the metalingual humor of the earlier plays, which resurrects itself in the London based sketch Victoria Station (1982) and the reworked novel The Dwarfs (1990), first written in the early 1950's. Pinter's recent nonhumorous vision finds its latest expression in his poem ‘American Football’ (1991), a poem not noted for metalingual technique, expressing the language of ‘fucking shit',²⁸ and retreating into almost mindless anti-Americanism. Similarly, the sketch ‘The New World Order’ (1991), lacks the subtle verbal dexterity of the earlier sketches. The short clipped dialogue, questions and pauses are present, as are the repetitions but the obsession with language such as ‘fucking’ and ‘cunt’ has replaced any comic strategy. In ‘The New World Order', Des tells Lionel, ‘You'd lose face in any linguistic discussion group, take my tip', to which Lionel replies ‘Christ, would I?’ Des responds, ‘You know what language means to you’. It is almost as if Pinter is writing about himself. Metalingual humor and innuendo have been replaced: a man is ‘just a prick … Or a cunt’.²⁹

Notes

1. Harold Pinter, ‘Writing for Myself’ in Twentieth Century 169 (February 1961), pp. 172-175.

2. See Deirdre Burton, ‘Conversation pieces', in Literary Text and Language Study, ed., Ronald Carter, Deirdre Burton (London, 1982), pp. 86-111.

3. See Roman Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and poetics', in Style in Language, ed., T. Sebeok (Cambridge, MA, 1960), pp. 350-377.

4. A Night Out in A Slight Ache and Other Plays. (London, 1961), p. 49.

5. The Birthday Party (ibid., 1963), p. 10.

6. The Room and the Dumb Waiter (ibid., 1970), p. 28.

7. Ibid., p. 39.

8. Tea Party and Other Plays (ibid., 1970), p, 84.

9. For a detailed discussion of Austin Quigley on Pinter and his application of Wittgenstein to Pinter's work, see Susan Hollis Merritt, Pinter in Play: Critical Strategies and the Plays of Harold Pinter. (Durham, N.C., 1990), pp. 139 ff.

10. Cf. Merritt, p. 289.

11. See Roman Jakobson, ‘Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics', in Style in language, ed. T. Sebeok (Cambridge, MA, 1960), pp. 350-77.

12. See Merritt, p. 168.

13. See for instance, H. P. Grice, ‘Further Notes on Logic and Conversation', in Syntax and Semantics, vol. 9, Pragmatics, ed. P. Cole (New York, 1978), pp. 113-127.

14. H. P. Grice, ‘Logic and Conversation', in Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3: Speech acts, eds., P. Cole and J. L. Morgan (New York, 1975), pp. 41-58.

15. The Room and the Dumb Waiter, p. 18-19.

16. Ibid., p. 46.

17. See n. 9 above.

18. The Room and the Dumb Waiter, p. 14.

19. The Birthday Party (London, 1963), p. 18.

20. The Room and the Dumb Waiter, p. 65.

21. Ibid., p. 67.

22. The Birthday Party, pp. 27-28; for an alternative reading of laughter and menace in the play see W. Baker and S. E. Tabachnick, Harold Pinter (Edinburgh, 1973), pp. 67-69.

23. The Birthday Party, p. 75.

24. The Room and the Dumb Waiter, p. 22.

25. The Birthday Party, pp. 17-18.

26. The Room and the Dumb Waiter, pp. 47-48, 62-63.

27. Katherine H. Burkman, ‘Party Time and Mountain Language', The Pinter Review, 1991, p. 74. See also Ann C. Hall, ‘Voices in the Dark: The Disembodied Voice in Harold Pinter's: Mountain Language’, ibid., pp. 17-22.

28. The Pinter Review, 1991, p. 41.

29. Ibid., p. 2.