The Anti-Subtle Humour of Clowning

The only halfway effective strategy I’ve come up with for exploring Kafka’s funniness in class involves suggesting to students that much of his humor is actually sort of unsubtle — or rather •anti•-subtle. 

“All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.”

Charlie Chaplin,

My Autobiography (1964), Ch. 10

Multiple Selves and Information Systems
by Robert Anton Wilson

Between 1910 and 1939, Charlie Chaplin always played the same character in all his films — the beloved little Tramp that became world-famous. 

In 1939, Chaplin wrote, directed and starred in The Great Dictator, in which the little Tramp did not appear. Instead, Chaplin played two charac-ters — a tyrant, based on Hitler, and a Jewish tailor, one of Hitler's victims. 

Audiences all over The World (except Germany, where the authorities banned the film) complained, mournfully and angrily, that they missed The Little Tramp. 

Chaplin, however, having gotten rid of The Tramp once, never did bring that persona back. 

In later films, he played many characters (a serial killer, a kindly old vaudevillian, a deposed king), but never the Tramp. People still com-plained that they wanted to see the Tramp again, but Chaplin went on creating new characters. 

(We will leave it to Jungians to explain why Chaplin had to become two opposite characters before he could personally escape the Archetype of the Tramp...) 

Many actors have had equally hard battles in getting detached from, if not a specific character, a specific type. Humphrey Bogart remained stuck in villain roles, usually gangsters, for nearly a decade before he got to play his first hero.

 Cary Grant never did escape from the hero type — either the romantic hero or the comic hero; when Alfred Hitchcock persuaded him to play a murderer, in Suspicion, the studio over-ruled both of them and tacked on a sur-prise ending in which the Grant character did not commit the murder, after all. Etc.

Back in "the real world," if a member of a family changes suddenly, the whole family suddenly appears agitated and disturbed. 

Family counselors have learned to expect this, even when the change consists of something everybody considers desirable — e.g., an alcoholic who suddenly stops drinking can "destabilize" the family to the extent that another member becomes clinically depressed, or develops psychosomatic symptoms, or even starts drink-ing heavily (as if the family "needed" an alcoholic). 

It seems that we not only speak and think in sentences like "John is an old grouch" but become disoriented and frightened if John suddenly starts acting friendly and generous. 

(Audiences rejected the previously "lovable" Chaplin most vehement-ly when he played the multiple wife-killer in Monsieur Verdoux. Probably, audiences would not have felt upset if the role had gone to the actor who originally wrote it for himself and sold it to Chaplin when the Hollywood moguls blacklisted him — Orson Welles.) 

If Dickens’ Scrooge had changed, in actuality, as he changed in the book, several people in his social field would have suddenly developed bizarre behaviors they had never shown before... 

Chaplin, amusingly, once made a comedy about the chaos created by a man who conspicuously does not exhibit the "isness" or "essence" our subject-predicate language programs us to expect, City Lights. 

In this film, The Little Tramp encounters a millionaire with two entirely different personalities: a generous and compassionate drunk, and a greedy, somewhat paranoid sober man. 

The Tramp and all the other characters soon exhibit behaviors that would look like clinical insanity to the audience, if we did not know the secret none of the characters guess: namely that each "personality" in the rich man appears when brain chemistry changes. 

The Russian mystic Gurdjieff claimed that we all contain multiple personalities. Many researchers in psychology and neuroscience now share that startling view. As Gurdjieff indicated, the "I" who toils at a job does not seem the same "I" who makes love with joy and passion, and the third "I" who occasionally gets angry for no evident reason seems a third personality, etc. There does not appear anything metaphysical about this; it even appears, measurably, on electroencephalograms. 

Dr. Frank Putnam of the National Institute of Health found that extreme cases of multiple personality — the only ones that ortho-dox psychiatry recognizes — show quite distinct brain waves for each "personality" almost as if the researchers had taken the electrodes off of one subject and attached them to another. (O'Regan. op. cit.) Dr. Rossi defines these separate personalities as "state specific information systems." 

Not only do we show different personalities when drunk and when sober, like Chaplin's emblematic millionaire, but we have different information banks ("memories") in these states. 

Thus, most people have noted that something that happened to them while drunk appears totally forgotten, until they get intoxicated again, and then the memory "miraculously" re-appears. 

This observation of state-specific information occurs even more frequently with LSD; nobody really remembers the richness of an LSD voyage until they take another dose. Emotional states seem part of a circular-causal loop with brain chemistry — it seems impossible, for science in 1990, to say that one part of the circle "causes" the other parts. 

Thus, we can now understand a phenomenon mentioned earlier, namely that we tend to remember happy experiences when happy and sad experiences when sad. The separate "personalities" or information systems within a typical human seem to fall into four main groups, with four additional groups appearing only in minorities who have engaged in one form or another of neurological self-research (metaprogramming).

“ The Gospel of Thomas is not in our canon for several reasons.

The Gospel of Thomas has become very famous, though, in the last part of the twentieth century because it was rediscovered and published and created something of a sensation.

According to the tradition, according to the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus had a Twin Brother and his name was Didymus Judas Thomas. 

Now, Didymus is simply the Greek word for "Twin," it's also used as the Greek word for "testicles" for obvious reasons; there are usually two of them. 

Didymus is the Greek word for "Twin" and Thomas is from a Semitic word, either Hebrew or Aramaic, or Syriac, which are all three similar languages, "Thomas" would look like in "Twin" in those. 

The guy's name is Judas, the Hebrew version would be Judah, the Greek word would be Judas, and the English version is Jude, so you sometimes see it in English translations Didymus Jude Thomas but it's the same word, Judah or Judas. 

His real name is Judah or Judas and Didymus, and Thomas are his nicknames, one Greek and one Semitic or Aramaic. 

He was The Twin Brother of Jesus, according to early Christian tradition, now just one strand of early Christian tradition that is Thomasine Christianity, the forms of Christianity, popular especially in Syria and the east which traced their existence back to the Apostle Thomas. 

There really was an Apostle Thomas among the 12 of Jesus' disciples and having the nickname "Twin." 

Traditional orthodox Christians don't believe he was •Jesus'• Twin Brother, they just believe that he had the •nickname• “Twin” because he was Somebody Else's Twin Brother. 

But in Thomasine Christianity he was connected to Jesus himself as Jesus' Twin.

According to some forms of eastern Christianity therefore, especially the early forms in Syria, Mesopotamia, and India--and yes there was very, very early forms of Christianity in the west coast of India. 

And if you meet an Indian person who's from that part of India and who considers themselves Christian, and they've been Christian for generations they will tell you, “Yes, Thomas was the apostle who brought The Gospel to India the first time.”

There are ancient traditions about this and modern Indian Christians still trace their church back to the Apostle Thomas.

There are all kinds of Thomas literature from the ancient world. It's not all alike, it doesn't all represent one kind of Christianity or one church, or even one region. 

Besides the Gospel of Thomas we know of The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, this is a wonderful documentary if you took my historical Jesus class you get to read the fragments of The Infancy Gospel of Thomas that we still have. 

It shows Jesus--everybody wonders, well what was Jesus like as a kid? 

What games did he play? 

Did he play cops and robbers? 

Did he play with dolls? 

What did Jesus do as a kid? 

Well Thomas tells you, it tells you for example, that he made a bunch of clay pigeons, and when this Jew--it's kind of anti-Jewish document, this Jew comes up and says, “You’re not supposed to be doing that on the Sabbath”, so Jesus claps his hands and the pigeons all fly off, the clay pigeons fly off. 

Or when one of his buddies get--when he gets mad at one of his buddies so he strikes the kid dead and then has to raise the kid up again. 

When one of his teachers criticizes him, he says, ‘What do you know you bimbo?’ and strikes the teacher dumb and blind or something. 

Jesus as a Little Kid in The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, is kind of a little rat but that's the way people imagined him as a child.”

“ My point is not that his wit is too subtle for US students. In fact, the only halfway effective strategy I’ve come up with for exploring Kafka’s funniness in class involves suggesting to students that much of his humor is actually sort of unsubtle — or rather •anti•-subtle. 

The claim is that Kafka’s funniness depends on some kind of radical literalization of Truths we tend to treat as metaphorical. I opine to them that some of our most profound collective intuitions seem to be expressible only as figures of speech, that that’s why we call these figures of speech expressions. 

With respect to “The Metamorphosis,” then, I might invite students to consider what is really being expressed when we refer to someone as ‘creepy’ or ‘gross’ or say that he is forced to ‘take shit’ as part of his job. 

Or to reread “In the Penal Colony” in light of expressions like ‘tongue-lashing’ or ‘tore him a new asshole’ or the gnomic “By middle age, everyone gets the face they deserve.” 

Or to approach “A Hunger Artist” in terms of tropes like ‘starved for attention’ or ‘love-starved’ or the double entendre in the term ‘self-denial’, or even as innocent a factoid as that the etymological root of ‘anorexia’ happens to be the Greek word for ‘longing’.”

SOME REMARKS ON KAFKA’S FUNNINESS FROM WHICH PROBABLY NOT ENOUGH HAS BEEN REMOVED,

by David Foster Wallace