Blogs in Focus: Editors Blog

Following on from yesterday's real-life collaboration between Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett, here is an imagined meeting between Beckett and fellow Irish genius scribbler James Joyce.

This bright idea was conceived by Donald Clarke, who made the short film Pitch 'n' Putt with Beckett 'n' Joyce as part of a shorts programme funded by the Irish Film Board. Despite clearly having been shot on the Irish coast, the film's supposed setting is Zurich in 1922, where Clarke imagines a golf game between the two literary greats. (Interestingly, Beckett and Joyce did actually know each other in real life, but that was only in 1928 when Beckett moved to Paris, where Joyce was living at the time.)

Joyce and Beckett are presented here in extreme caricature, Beckett serenely silent and still in contrast to Joyce, who is hyperactive and constantly spouting inane filth. They are waiting for "Mr. Yeats" (presumably William Butler), who we suspect is about as likely to turn up as Godot. The film is just two and a half minutes long, deeply silly and peppered with profanity, but also very enjoyable in its playful parodying of these two legendary figures. The film reaches an ingenious zenith at the moment when Joyce describes the Topic candy bar as "all fecund in its nuttiness.".