Hancock's Last Half-Hour pits an individual against meaninglessness, but in this play the individual loses.
Hancock, a former clown, desperately performs comedy to keep the silence from deafening him. He has locked himself in a hotel-room and there engages in the performance that is the play. The performer's fear of audience indifference drives Hancock and accounts for the desperation of his monologue that includes jokes, readings from encyclopedias, Freud's Jokes, and press clippings, and parodies of such set-pieces as Hamlet's soliloquy. This fear also accounts for his self-mockery and for his final suicide.