It was called 'comedy of menace' quite a long time ago.

His early works were described by critics as "comedy of menace".

To a great extent, "Creditors" foreshadows modern comedies of menace, as the characters are led to mutually destructive ends.

Wardle was a close friend of the writer Harold Pinter, for whose work he coined the phrase "comedies of menace".

But this nifty little number, which Ms. Schenkar wryly calls "a comedy of menace," may not make everyone who wakes from it long to dream again.

Murder rendered many of the human characters inert as well, for this was a comedy of menace, reminiscent of the mysterious stories and drawings of Edward Gorey.

Like his plays of the 1980s, The Hothouse concerns authoritarianism and the abuses of power politics, but it is also a comedy, like his earlier comedies of menace.

Comedy of menace is the body of plays written by David Campton, Nigel Dennis, N. F. Simpson, and Harold Pinter.

(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.)

AFTER his first three full-length plays - comedies of menace that take place in raffish English households - Harold Pinter wrote "Old Times," "No Man's Land" and "Betrayal."

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 .

In what is partly a comedy of menace, Mr. Havis artfully weaves a web of suspicion around his three principal characters, at first with a series of terse, portentous conversations between the colonel and the architect.

The Birthday Party has been described (some say "pigeonholed") by Irving Wardle and later critics as a "Comedy of menace" and by Martin Esslin as an example of the Theatre of the Absurd.

It is always a lesson to return to the leaky, junk-filled room of Harold Pinter's "Caretaker," the troubling play that brought the playwright his first big success and came to define what Irving Wardle called "the comedy of menace."

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.

In an entry on Pinter for the 1969 edition of The Encyclopedia of World Drama cited by Merritt, Wardle repeats and updates some of his first perspective on comedy of menace as he had applied it initially to Pinter's writing:

The Birthday Party is a 1968 British drama film directed by William Friedkin, based on an unpublished screenplay by 2005 Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter, which he adapted from his own play The Birthday Party, considered an example of Pinter's "comedy of menace".

And there'll be two evenings devoted to readings of his best verse, including The Waste Land and The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, plus the chance to hear his extraordinary dramatic fragment Sweeney Agonistes, which prefigures Pinter's comedy of menace by more than 30 years.

Yet, as the Waiter's often comically unbelievable reminiscences about his grandfather demonstrate in Celebration, Pinter's final stage plays also extend some expressionistic aspects of his earlier "memory plays", while harking back to his "comedies of menace", as illustrated in the characters and in the Waiter's final speech:

"Just two years later" (1960), however, Wardle retracted "Comedy of Menace" in his review of The Caretaker, stating: "On the strength of 'The Birthday Party' and the pair of one-acters, I rashly applied the phrase 'comedy of menace' to Pinter's writing.

In a review published in 1958, borrowing from the subtitle of The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace, a play by David Campton, critic Irving Wardle called Pinter's early plays "comedy of menace"-a label that people have applied repeatedly to his work.