This “Ha ha” phrase came up to me recently in “Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician” by Alfred Jarry (1911). It’s at once a serious treatment of the terribly unserious and an unserious treatment of the terminally serious. I can’t not recommend it slightly enough.
Chapter 10: Concerning The Dogfaced Baboon Bosse-de-Nage, Who Knew No Human Words But “Ha Ha”
“Bosse-de-Nage was a dogfaced baboon less cyno- than hydrocephalous, and, as a result of this blemish, less intelligent than his fellows. The red and blue callosity which they sport on their buttocks was, in his case, displaced by Faustroll, by means of some strange medication, and grafted on to his cheeks, azurine on one, scarlet on the other, so that his flat face was tricolor…
‘Ha ha,’ he said in French; and he added nothing more. ”
(Then it gets really weird…)
And it got me thinking. Absurdity, in all its various forms, has been part of the human experience for a long, long time. Maybe since the very beginning. How absurd, even if allegorical, are so many of the stories in the Old Testament. Lot’s wife, for example, in the Book of Genesis. She disobeys the angel’s order and turns to look back on Sodom, when *poof* she’s a pillar of salt. How absurd! I mean, why not pepper? Or paprika?? Ha ha! And what of the Greek myths. Sisyphus is punished by Hades for his repeated insolence by having to cyclically roll a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down (to Sodom?), for all eternity. Albert Camus himself would surely agree that this is absurdity of the highest degree. Plato’s cave? Of PLAY-DOH made. Rabelais? A witty knave. What of the Bard? Quite the card. La Mancha’s man? Pure dead pan. Voltaire’s “Candide”? Pangloss, indeed. Just ask Gogol. He “Nose.” Jarry’s “Roi” ? Pataphysical joy. Or Roussel’s “Locus”? Duchamp’s dark focus. Dada? Yes, Dada. Ever Dada. And yet never Dada. From Tristan Tzara? You may borrow. But S. Dali? To a “T” (as the band plays on — though well out of tune, from various rooms, and to vastly different moons). And what of Artaud? Well, ask Ionesco. But it’s Heller’s purview, that Catch-22. And as for Becket? Oh, God, yeah! But Stoppard? No stopping him now! Ha-ha!! Unless he’s gone Trout Fishing in America… or in “Brazil”… With Robert Altman? And the Repo Man! It’s a Diner-style M*A*S*H-up that only that dunce-head Reilly could push past the valve. It has a Python’s grip. With a John Oliver twist. Kaufmanesque. With a hint of Guest. And a Fear and Loathing of musical “Pollution.” Because it’s a mad, mad, mad, Mad Magazine, that Onion is. Lost in the cosmos. But with a Strangelove for Being There. At least that’s what they were saying down at the Office (Space), pre-pandemic. And over at Alice’s Restaurant. And you may ask yourself, “Who’s left to Lampoon when the powers-that-be are doing such a fine job of torching themselves?!”
Alas, what would DEVO do??
It’s clear and getting clearer, this world’s weird and getting weirder!
So let’s just go with it.
And laugh-laugh at ourselves (with the Beau Brummels!).
What choice do we have?
Great Exudations 