Abstract
Many critics suggest that Beckett’s early plays are comic because they focus their analyses on the use comic elements. Waiting for Godot is one of Beckett’s early plays, and it has been heavily analyzed and read as a comic text partly because its subtitle is “a tragicomedy in two acts” and also because of the comic techniques used in the play. The present paper, however, attempts to read the play as a piece in which comedy fails to produce any effects on the characters who remain apparently very desperate and frustrated throughout the play. The characters perform different comic acts, but they do not really feel amused or entertained. The paper suggests that the acts these characters put on stage are only means to pass time and avoid thinking about their predicament. The paper thus does not reject the comic reading of the play, but consider it a partial reading that does not capture the different dimensions of this text.
Highlights
Many critics suggest that Beckett’s early plays are comic because they focus their analyses on the use comic elements
Why does Beckett conceive the frustration of waiting in humorous terms? Did he, like comedy and humor critics and theorists of the first half of the last century, perceive humor as an appropriate defense strategy against suffering and failure? Beckett’s early critics including, Esslin in The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), Kenner in Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (1961), and Cohn in Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut (1962), consider his early works comic because they focus on comic elements
Simon does not reject the comic reading of Beckett; rather, he thinks that it is only a partial reading that excludes what Beckett himself realizes later
Summary
Many critics suggest that Beckett’s early plays are comic because they focus their analyses on the use comic elements. The play, might be called a comedy of incongruity in which characters use hat games, cross-talk, stories, jokes, and performances, to pass time while waiting. Didi and Gogo are tied to each other by their need for an audience to keep their show going while waiting.
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