Gus and Ben are both lower-class criminals, and most productions of the play emphasize their social status with appropriate dialects and accents. Some productions may even opt to give Ben a slightly higher-ranking accent, as he is more concerned with his standing. He repeatedly admonishes Gus for his "slack" appearance and habits, urging him to make himself more presentable, but Ben also seems more resigned to his lowly criminal life; he considers them fortunate for having jobs. His profound shame over his class emerges in interactions with those upstairs via the dumb waiter, and much of this shame is tied to language. The food orders from the dumb waiter are for increasingly exotic foods with unfamiliar names, and Ben pretends to know how to make them only to a point. When they decide to send up their cache of food, even Gus feels he has to impress those upstairs by announcing the brand names of their pedestrian foodstuffs. Ben also happily reports that the man upstairs, presumably of higher social standing, uses the same debated phrase—"Light the kettle"—as he does, and he warns Gus to observe decorum when talking to the upstairs, as he demonstrates with his formal apology. Ben is far more reverent of Wilson than the inquiring Gus, and his deference is attributed less to feelings of respect than to an overriding inferiority complex; Wilson is their leader for a reason, and he must obey him at all costs, even if it means betraying his friend. In this light, The Dumb Waiter can be read as an anti-corporate update of Beckett's Waiting for Godot, an allegory of in- fighting and what corporate workers will do to please their superiors.