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Dialectical Laughter: A Study of Endgame RICHARD KELLER SIMON "Let's get as many laughs as we can out ofthis horrible mess," Becken told the actor playing Hamm during the 1964 London production of Endgame,' a statement which echoes Nell's speech to Nagg within the play that "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness ... it's the most comical thing in the world." But Beckett wants his audience to start laughing and Nell wants Nagg to stop. Unhappiness is so constant she tells him, "like the funny story we have heard too often," that we can finally laugh no more even though "we still find it funny ... "(pp. 18-19). Nell laughs only once during the play, less than any ofthe other characters who are themselves infrequent laughers but not yet at her level of exhaustion (or wisdom). Beckett's audience, to take the testimony of reviewers and critics, laughs much more often. Nagg listens to Nell's speech without comprehension and Beckett's audience may have similar problems with it, for her concept is difficult, the most comical which is also the least laughable, and the audience's situation is difficult, the spectators prodded to laugh by a play that shows characters on stage prodded to stop laughing. The tears and laughs of the world are a constant quantity, Pozzo announces in Wairing for Godor, and "For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh" (p. 22). It is this principle of the conservation of psychic energy that Endgame illustrates. From the beginning when Clov appears to laugh five times, to the end when Clov appears in aludicrous outfit designed to provoke laughs from the audience, laughter has gradually moved from stage to audience. But it has not moved at all smoothly, for within this gradual shift there is another more rapid alternation back and forth between laughter on stage and laughter in the audience. If Endgame can be seen as a chess game between characters and spectators, then laughter is the means by which each side makes its play, and at the end when the spectators have the strength to keep playing and the characters do not, the game is over. "Theatrical art," wrote Theodor Adorno" ... cannot be separated from 506 RICHARD KELLER SIMON audience reaction,"2 In Endgame audience reaction supplies an essential element not present in the text, the sound of its own laughter, which enters into a series of interactions with the laughter present in the text and acted out on the stage. Endgame becomes, if Beckett's direction is achieved, a study of and participation in the meaning of laughter. This laughter within the theatre is dialectical as it moves back and forth between stage and audience and confronts, undercuts, and negates itself. On the stage Beckett follows a joke with its opposite, then contrasts the positive aspects of laughing with its opposite, and finally near the end of the play presents a story by Hamm as a negation of the play itself and its premises about laughter. Lacking any kind of synthesis, this dialectic of laughter finds no resolution, though at the end this laughter does find a new home, and the audience leaves the theatre with the capacity to laugh which has been both burden and saving grace for the characters on stage. That there is something strange or difficult about the laughter Beckett's plays provoke in audiences has been noted by many critics and reviewers, but for the most part this laughter has been taken as an indication that Beckett is writing a strange or difficult variety of comedy. Yet Beckett's work, at least up to the early 1960'S, contains what can more adequately be described as an inquiry into the nature of laughter and the comic, rather than a concern with comic style or comic effect by itself. In the interpretation ofBeckett, critics have been forced to consider what laughter signifies, what terms like farce and tragicomedy can designate and what not (Watt Knot), what comedy and the comic sense can deal with effectively and what not, but they have taken up these questions with relatively little awareness that...

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