I liked to read Godot. I actually thought that the message was if your waiting for a miracle to fix what is wrong then you’ll wait forever. Get off your butt and stop wickedness instead of watching it unfold. But I suppose I took a different message from the work than most people.
That's a pretty good post-modern reading of the play. People nowadays don't make a display of modern despair, but tend more to accept the world as it is.
The intellectuals of the 1940s and 1950s were a pretty depressed lot, though, and they took the message to be existential despair in a godless world.
But Bert Lahr was in the New York cast, and he probably wasn't trying to convey existential despair. Here's the original New York Times review:
... Since "Waiting for Godot" has no simple meaning, one seizes on Mr. Beckett's experience of two worlds to account for his style and point of view. The point of view suggests Sartre--bleak, dark, disgusted. The style suggests Joyce--pungent and fabulous. Put the two together and you have some notion of Mr. Beckett's acrid cartoon of the story of mankind. ...