Comedy of menace significant person Harold Pinter
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.  (Campton's subtitle Comedy of Menace is a jocular play-on-words derived from comedy of manners—menace being manners pronounced with somewhat of a Judeo-English accent.)Background
Citing Wardle's original publications in Encore magazine (1958), Susan Hollis Merritt points out that in "Comedy of Menace" Wardle "first applies this label to Pinter's work … describ[ing] Pinter as one of 'several playwrights who have been tentatively lumped together as the "non-naturalists" or "abstractionists" ' (28)" (Merritt 225).  His article "Comedy of Menace," Merritt continues,Early in his writing career Pinter admitted to three influences: Franz Kafka, American gangster films, and Samuel Beckett. . . . At that time his plays, more than those of any other plawright's  [sic], were responsible for the newly coined term 'comedy of menace.'  This phrase certainly makes sense when applied to The Birthday Party . . . or to The Dumb Waiter. . . . But 'menace' is hardly the word for The Caretaker, and still less for subsequent plays in which Pinter increasingly exchanged his derelict settings and down-and-out characters for environments of moneyed elegance (657–58).  (Qtd. in Merritt 240)
Despite those more-recent caveats regarding applying the phrase that he himself initially coined for Pinter's writing to The Caretaker—only the second of Pinter's full-length plays produced by then and the one that launched his career as a successful playwright in 1960 (Merritt 9, 226) —and to Pinter's later plays, scenes in both acts of The Caretaker in which Mick confronts an unsuspecting Davies and scares him almost speechless (Pinter, The Caretaker 129, 146) also epitomise how comedy and menace still co-exist in Pinter's text and on Pinter's stage.
The comic aspects of this play multiply, reaching a crescendo in Mick's monologue in Act Two describing his "deepest wishes" for decorating the attic room (161, 173) and falling with Davies, a tramp taken in out of the cold by his brother, suggesting that "if" he can "just get down to Sidcup" to get his "papers" and "sort" himself "out" (113–16, 164), his refrain and excuse for everything (153, 175–79), he might just be able to accomplish Mick's hyperbolic pipe dream and "decorate the attic room out for [Mick]" (164), leading Mick to accuse Davies of misrepresenting himself as "an experienced first-class professional interior and exterior decorator" (172–74), an absurd conclusion, given the tangible evidence of the down-and-out Davies before Mick (and the audience).
Pinter's friend the late film and stage director David Jones, who directed the play for the Roundabout Theatre, in New York City, in 2003 (having previously directed Pinter's 1983 film of Betrayal, as well as other works by or featuring him), reminds his audience that Pinter himself said, in a widely quoted statement, that The Caretaker is only "funny, up to a point" and that "beyond that point" is why he wrote it: