Samuel Beckett, with his quizzically peering gaze and handsome, hawk-like appearance, has long been the academic’s pin-up. Endless PhD dissertations exalt the Irish writer, who was born 120 years ago in Dublin on April 13, 1906, as an unsmiling existential hermit figure when he was really nothing of the sort. Over the 60 years of his writing career, Beckett created a memorable gallery of tramps, waifs and other “crotchety moribunds” who find a lugubrious comedy in human failings. “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” declares a character in Endgame, while Estragon in Waiting for Godot pines for death in a dry climate where they “crucify quick.”

Beckett’s terminal vision was bleakly humorous – and comedy often intruded on his life. In 1969, an admirer purporting to be a Monsieur Godot congratulated Beckett on winning the Nobel Prize: “I am very sorry to have kept you waiting,” he wrote. Not at all, Beckett replied, and thanks for revealing yourself so promptly. Godot had been greeted with boos and catcalls when it hit the London stage in 1955, yet it made Beckett famous. In Miami, wonderfully, the play was billed as “the laugh hit of two continents,” a verdict that was not far wrong. The very name “Godot” suggested comic theological dread. The story goes that Beckett once made a........

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