ABSTRACT
Playwrights love to watch audiences die laughing. Harold Pinter’s comedy, especially his recent Celebration (1999), kills us with laughter. We laugh helplessly at his darkly delightful Celebration, at painful truths beneath the crude remarks of loveless men who traffic in crime-the guns, money, and drugs that run the world. He wages comedy against crimes of the heart, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and, culminating, in Press Conference (2002), perhaps our worst crime born of unconfronted fear: cowardice. Yet paradoxically, his comedy does so as a call to courage, to equitable justice. Pinter deploys comedy as an attack weapon aimed at the destructive portions of the heroic vision we live by, which drives the conflict for survival and power in every beat and scene of his plays.1 His core conflict driven by that heroic vision perpetuates often deadly hierarchical conflict.
