Waiting for Guffman Waiting for Guffman Waiting for Guffman is a 1997 American mockumentary comedy film written by Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy, and directed by Guest. The film's ensemble cast (who improvised their dialogue based on Guest and Levy's story) includes Guest, Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Fred Willard, and Parker Posey. The film's title is a reference to Samuel Beckett's play "Waiting for Godot". As in the other mockumentary films created by Guest, the majority of the dialogue is improvised. Because the film is about the production of a stage musical, it contains several original musical numbers written by Guest, Michael McKean and
Theatre of the Absurd plots of many Absurdist plays feature characters in interdependent pairs, commonly either two males or a male and a female. Some Beckett scholars call this the "pseudocouple". The two characters may be roughly equal or have a begrudging interdependence (like Vladimir and Estragon in "Waiting for Godot" or the two main characters in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"); one character may be clearly dominant and may torture the passive character (like Pozzo and Lucky in "Waiting for Godot" or Hamm and Clov in "Endgame"); the relationship of the characters may shift dramatically throughout the play (as in Ionesco's "The Lesson"