3 - The sacred joke: comedy and politics in Pinter’s early plays

Summary

In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud explains that three people are required for the successful telling of a tendentious or purposeful joke. '[In] addition to the one who makes the joke, there must be a second who is taken as the object of the hostile or sexual aggressiveness, and a third in whom the joke's aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled.' In other words, jokes are constructed like theatrical events, and are verbalised for the purpose of pleasing or impressing an audience. If this were not the case, there would be no point in saying the joke aloud: the joke-maker could simply think his amusing thoughts for his own pleasure. The fact that the joke-maker goes to the effort of actually telling the joke shows that he is not the primary receiver of pleasure, that the joke is being told for the purpose of creating a relationship with someone else. Thus the public telling of a joke creates recognisable positions: the aggressor, the victim and the audience. Furthermore, the act of telling a joke forces everyone within earshot to become a part of the event: there is no neutral position. To be within earshot is to be involved: merely to listen to a joke is to declare oneself one way or the other, to be compromised. The third party, the audience, is forced to take sides in the conflict between the joke-teller and the victim: to laugh is to ally oneself with the aggressor, to refuse to laugh is to ally oneself with the victim. Comedy thus functions as a sort of litmus test for the audience. Will they laugh or not laugh? With whom will they side? Freud's joke-theory provides a useful key to Harold Pinter's early plays, which were labelled comedies of menace by the theatre critic Irving Wardle.