When the first director of Waiting for Godot, Roger Blin, initially met with Samuel Beckett in 1950 to discuss the production of the play, Blin suggested that it be staged as a circus. Not wanting to offend Blin, Beckett gradually shifted their conversation around to the films of early comics such as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. According to Deidre Bair, Beckett's first biographer, Blin immediately got the hint and gave up the circus idea,1 but one can sympathize with Blin because Vladimir and Estragon themselves compare their evening (albeit unfavorably) to an assortment of popular theatrical forms, with Estragon emphasizing the circus. They describe their evening as:

vladimir: Worse than the pantomime.

estragon: The circus.

vladimir: The music-hall.

estragon: The circus.

All of these modes of entertainment informed Beckett's early views of character, action, place, and time, but Beckett was right to steer Blin in the direction of early film, even though Beckett, like later critics, failed to acknowledge his special debt to the films of Laurel and Hardy. No doubt Beckett was correct when he told Blin that Hamm and Clov, as well as Didi and Gogo, were ultimately he and his long-time companion and wife Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, but the artistic shape in which he developed these couples and later directed productions of his plays was informed in no small way by this famous comedic pair, or what Colin Duckworth might have called a “pseudocouple,” following Beckett's reference in The Unnamable to the interdependent title characters of Mercier and Camier.3

Beckett's passion for the cinema is well documented. As a young man in Dublin, Bair tells us, Beckett “never missed a film starring Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy (who became the “hardy Laurel” in the novel Watt), or Harold Lloyd.”4 During the 1930s, Beckett saw every Marx Brothers movie he could, and his love for films continued well into the 1950s; moviegoing, in fact, was by then one of the few activities he still regularly enjoyed with Dumesnil.

Of the Beckett critics, Ruby Cohn was the first to observe a specific debt to film when in 1973 she pointed out that Vladimir's and Estragon's comic exchange of hats in the second act of Waiting for Godot was inspired by a scene in the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933).