Samuel Beckett's use of comedy in Krapp's Last Tape

¶ … Laughing Leprechaun

While we have all been told at one time or another to avoid stereotypes, even the most unbiased of us tend to have such simplistic views ensconced somewhere in our minds. And so it is that when one thinks of the Irish one is a little too likely to think either of famine or of jollity. Or even both together. For the Irish, and especially Irishmen, can seem congenitally bound up with the idea of the glint in the eye, the whistling wayfarer, the jig at the bar, the leprechaun with his absurd green hat. Irish humor is stereotypically bound up with the idea of making the best of things, of creating step-dancing and reels and stories of faerie out of misery rather than with more mordant forms of humor. It is perhaps for this reason above all that the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett seems to be (or is at least judged as being) so humorless. He is not the Gaelic bard with a "glint in his eye and a glass in his hand" (as in the words of many folksongs) but a man straddling Modernism, looking wryly at the world around him. This paper examines the humor to be found in Beckett's plays and how it is tied both to his moment in literary history and to the older traditions of Gaelic storytelling.

It is hard to know where to begin in describing Samuel Beckett, and so it is of no small comfort to know that one of his primary biographers also seemed to have a difficult time knowing how to set out the writer's origins. "Biographies often begin with a date of birth, the date on which the subject's experiences can be said to begin. In the case of Samuel Beckett there are two difficulties about adopting this simple procedure. One is his claim to have been born on Good Friday, 13 April 1906. The other is his repeated insistence that he had memories of life in his mother's womb." (Cronin 3).

The problem with the first statement is that the official record of his birth does not back this claim up. The problem with the second statement is more complicated.

While generally a truthful man, Beckett may have been to tempted by the attraction of having been born on Good Friday to resist some tweaking of the historical record, for he very much identified with Christ. This feeling of connection, writes Cronin, was neither sacrilegious nor narcissistic, but reflected Beckett's keen understanding of human suffering as exemplified by the human aspects of Christ.

The idea that he had been born on Good Friday, the day of the Saviour's crucifixion, pleased him, more especially since Good Friday happened in 1906 to have been Friday the thirteenth. What better birth-date could there be for someone so conscious of the suffering which underlies human existence; and conscious also that misfortune, in comic or tragic guise, awaited every venture and departure? In a late work, Company, which is highly autobiographical, the coincidence of his birth-date with the day of the Saviour's death is emphasized.

'You were born on an Easter Friday after long labour...' And: 'You first saw the light and cried at the close of the day when in darkness Christ at the ninth hour cried and died.' Not only was Beckett pleased with the Christ connection involved in having been born on a Good Friday, but he was never averse to introducing analogies and comparisons between Christ's life-story and those of his degraded characters (Cronin 3-4).

As Spender, writing a review of Beckett in 1958, would summarize this aspect of the Irish playwright's work, Beckett is continually drawn to the "foetal position to describe life, all the life of his unnamable non-heroes." Beckett hops from one childhood to the next, like a religious fanatic leaping from one burning coal to the next, as his characters (in his autobiographical works) relentlessly pursue their " the search for identity of the about-to-be born, the loss of identity of the senescent."

There is humor in this, certainly, as there is always humor in an accurate description of the human condition. But it is humor-at-a-reserve, the quiet laugh of the observer.

Such a balance between the infantile and the senescent -- those two states of human development during which the individual is both the most deserving of compassion and the most likely to be the recipient of scorn. Beckett may well have associated such a combination of contempt and compassion with the ways in which the world viewed Ireland and the Irish. Much of the humor in his plays (as well as in the rest of his writings) arises from his awareness of the misery into which he plunges his characters and the ways in which they carry on, defending their humanity even as they are reduced scene by scene to an utter lack of humanity.

As Taubman wrote in his 1961 review of Happy Days, Beckett can be funny even in the middle of the most poignant descriptions of despair. Humor for Beckett arises most often and most effectively from his exploitation of incongruity, and his favorite incongruity is that between the misery of life and the hope that humans persist in carrying with them.

Like his earlier plays, Mr. Beckett's latest work reflects a sorrowing vision of man and his world. A bitter, often earthy, humor lights it up. But what it reveals is shadowed in pessimism. Man struggles for hope, but his destiny, as "Happy Days" sees it, is tragic. The earth reduces him to a crawling thing and ultimately swallows him.... "Happy Days" describes the aridity of life, but, in Winnie's words, "sorrow keeps breaking in." If Mr. Beckett does not lift the heart, his mournful song is at least compassionate, and that is a great deal.

This is the key to his artistry, and essential to the Irishness of his work -- something that is more obviously present in his English-language work than in his French writings.

Teetering on the Edge of the Postmodern

It is no doubt a fool's errand to try to draw any sort of bright line between the end of Modernism and the beginning of Postmodernism, especially as there was no sudden bolt from on high by the literary gods that banished Modernism from the scene. For while it is certainly convenient to set up the rules for different literary traditions and to see different schools as arising opposition to each other, there is always a certain amount of looseness between different schools. There are suggestions of Postmodernism in James Joyce -- and Franz Kafka -- and there are strong strains of Modernism in John Updike. The authors of any generation (at least since the Enlightenment) have never been unified.

Beckett certainly has elements of the Modernist in him, for he has little respect for the conventions of time-line and plot and authorial consistency that a writer like Henry James validated and valued. His work (and this is probably most obviously apparent in his most famous work, Waiting for Godot) wanders and darts from here to over there, stopping along the way at points that are obvious only to the author and his characters, not to the audiences and readers. Watching his plays can have the same feeling as watching a very young child let loose on the beach: Joy and terror in the face of the ocean's might, and delight in both the most wondrous and most ordinary of jetsam.

Exactly how to categorize Beckett -- pursuing the idea for now that such characterizations are important to the process of understanding the author -- is made more problematic, as Fiedler's 1997 commentary on Beckett notes, because of the order in which the world became familiar with Beckett's work:

By one of those odd accidents of literary history the work of Samuel Beckett has been revealed to most of us backward: first his play, "Waiting for Godot," written in the Fifties, next "Malloy" and "Malone Dies," novels published just after the last war; and now "Murphy," which first appeared in 1938 but was scarcely noticed in this country. In the meanwhile Mr. Beckett has undergone a transformation from an English writer to a French one. "Murphy" was published first in the language of its Irish author. The later novels and the play have come to us as his own translations from the language of the country of his exile, France.

The metamorphosis is appropriate: Beckett is one of the last of the post-World War I expatriates, an almost final survivor of that experimentalism in literature and that vision of Paris as a cultural homeland, over which his master, James Joyce, once presided. Come on in the Fifties, discovered backward from the highbrow burlesque of "Godot," such a survivor has a special appeal, seems quite different from what he might have appeared against the background of the decaying tag-ends of the avant-garde of the Twenties.

Not only did Beckett span the worlds of Modernism and Postmodernism in terms of his biography, as a result of the particulars of when and where he was born, moving foreward from Modernism to Postmodernism, but he also moved backward from Postmodernism to Modernism as people tended to come into contact with his work in reverse order.

Such a parsing of into which school Samuel Beckett can be slotted may seem to be nothing more than intellectual engagement -- not that there is anything wrong with this -- but it also serves as an important way of assessing both the "Irishness" and the humor of Beckett's writings. Unlike a writer like John Synge, for example, or William Butler Yeats, Beckett is generally not clearly identifiable as Irish from the dialect or settings or historical references in his writings. (This is especially true, of course, once he begins to write in French.) But there are hints of his nationality in this back-and-forthing that he does with literary genres and literary conventions. Such liberty with self-identification in terms of artistic identity is not solely Irish, of course. But an unwillingness to be categorized neatly does seem to be clearly associated with colonial identity. Ireland in Beckett's time was still culturally and politically very much a colony, very much a nation that did not get to define himself. By refusing to be a single kind of writer, Beckett both acknowledges and laments this kind of colonial sidelining.

But Is It Funny?

Beckett's plays are full of the absurd, of things that cannot happen, or cannot happen together. He writes lines of dialogue that are full of legerdemain, pulling not rabbits out of hats (although this too is absurd when one thinks of it -- why rabbits, after all?) but words that stick to each other like gorse to tweed. An exchange like the following from the second act of Waiting for Godot seems to be just lighthearted word play at first, but the volleys back and forth between Vladimir and Estragon are their method for wearing down each other's humanity:

VLADIMIR:

When you seek you hear.

ESTRAGON:

You do.

VLADIMIR:

That prevents you from finding.

ESTRAGON:

It does.

VLADIMIR:

That prevents you from thinking.

ESTRAGON:

You think all the same.

VLADIMIR:

No no, it's impossible.

ESTRAGON:

That's the idea, let's contradict each another.

VLADIMIR:

Impossible.

ESTRAGON:

You think so?

VLADIMIR:

We're in no danger of ever thinking any more.

ESTRAGON:

Then what are we complaining about?

VLADIMIR:

Thinking is not the worst.

ESTRAGON:

Perhaps not. But at least there's that.

VLADIMIR:

That what?

ESTRAGON:

That's the idea, let's ask each other questions.

It's a funny scene because of its absurdity. Beckett manages to convey an important truth in this scene -- thinking isn't the worst thing, after all, feeling is -- with the bluntest of instruments. This is key to humor throughout Beckett's work: He presents us with layers of incongruities and so we find ourselves laughing at his characters in the same way that we do at the clown with the too-big shoes and the absurdly large hammer. Beckett's world is, behind the austerity of his language and the outright misery of most of his characters most of the time, a funhouse one.

The same theme of what is the worst that can happen -- and then could be worse still -- comes up again in Endgame, as in this scene:

Clov: You've got on with it, I hope.

Hamm: (modestly). Oh not very far, not very far. (He sighs.) There are days like that, one isn't inspired. (Pause). No forcing, no forcing, it's fatal. (Pause.) I've got on with it a little all the same. (Pause.) Technique, you know. (Pause. Irritably) I say I've got on with it a little all the same.

Clov: (admiringly). Well I never! In spite of everything you were able to get on with it!