The Brooklyn Rail

If you’re about to kill someone and they laugh at you, does it make you feel better or worse? Let’s imagine some run-of-the-mill totalitarian scenario: firing squad, bound targets, pocked wall. We know the valiant response of the raised chin and steely glower; but a more corrosive one might be a simple guffaw, a repudiation of the assassin’s humorless intent. How can you argue with someone who snickers as the bullet rushes toward them?

“Humor would be anarchy if it could be an attitude,” wrote the Yugoslav Surrealist Koča Popović. Humor, in the Surrealist universe, is not the kind of jollity that breeds fellowship. It is not lighthearted, not empathetic, jovial, or festive. Rather, it appropriates and subverts the techniques of hilarity to throw alienation in your face. It is glacial, often cruel, even grim, yet disturbingly thrilling and strangely liberating. It is antisocial and volatile, a partly macabre, often nonsensical, wholly vitriolic turn of spirit that André Breton, in his Anthologie de l'humour noir [Anthology of Black Humor] (1940), defined as “the mortal enemy of sentimentality” and “a superior revolt of the mind.” We recognize that brand of humor so easily today—in everything from sitcoms to children’s cartoons to mainstream advertising to the films of David Lynch and the Coen brothers—that we might forget how abrasive it originally was, and how subversive it might still be, when not co-opted by our resolutely cynical age. The question is, how much did Surrealist humor help foster that cynicism, and how much does it merely express the zeitgeist?

While black humor draws on many previous sources, from Jonathan Swift to Charles Baudelaire, Franz Kafka to Dada, its true conceptual catalysts date to World War I, with Breton’s discovery of Arthur Rimbaud’s sardonically defeatist letters about the Franco-Prussian War (“My nation is rising up! … Personally, I’d rather it stay seated.”) and his encounter, while serving in an army hospital, with the young soldier Jacques Vaché. It was Vaché—who once threatened to shoot up a theater because he didn’t like the play, and who claimed he didn’t mind dying but “object[ed] to being killed in wartime” (he in fact died, apparently by suicide, practically the minute the war ended)—who supplied the ur-definition of humor as the Surrealists conceived it: “I believe it is a sensation—I almost said a SENSE—that too—of the theatrical (and joyless) pointlessness of everything.” We know about joyless pointlessness; let’s not forget “theatrical”: “umor,” as Vaché styled it, is not quietly funny, but explosive, stagey, demanding of attention, and utterly futile. The noisy celebration of that futility is the core of it. “In Vaché’s person,” Breton later wrote, “a principle of total insubordination was undermining the world, reducing everything that then seemed all-important to a petty scale, desecrating everything in its path.” The fact that we can now associate this attitude with comedy and not bat an eye shows how far into the Surrealist domain of humor we’ve traveled in a hundred years.

A hundred years ago, then; or rather, a hundred and five. Spring 1919. Breton and Philippe Soupault are spending a few days cloistered in Breton’s room in the Hôtel des Grands Hommes on Place du Panthéon, “blackening some paper” with whatever comes into their heads, without conscious intervention. “Prisoners of drops of water, we are nothing but perpetual animals.” “You know that tonight there is a green crime to commit.” “God the Father’s will to greatness does not go beyond 4,810 meters in France.” In reading back what their joint unconscious had dictated, what particularly impressed them, said Soupault, was “the involuntary and extraordinary humor that sprung out at the turn of a phrase. We burst out laughing.” Breton, two decades away from formulating black humor, described this laughter as “offensive, wholly new, absolutely savage.”

Surrealist humor is not just about offense, of course (salutary as that might be), but also about defense, a preventative against the constrictions fostered by the so-called serious, adult mindset—the same mindset that finds justification in warfare and territorial occupation; coerces major portions of society into brain-deadening, bare-subsistence jobs; or ushers vainglorious buffoons into positions of leadership. During World War II, under the Nazi occupation, groups like La Main à Plume in France and De Schone Zakdoek (“The Clean Kerchief”) in the Netherlands would host evenings of Surrealist games, not as a frivolous distraction—playing them was grounds for arrest and execution—but as a dissident act. The Surrealist writer Jean-Louis Bédouin later specified that this “was not a matter of trying to deny the gravity of the situation. It was a matter of preserving, at any cost, sufficient freedom of mind with respect to it.”

The bullet flies toward you. The autocrat seizes power. The war keeps raging. Laugh on.