Dirty Jokes: On the Wit of Werner Büttner by Kate Brown
“With the return of dirt comes redemption”1 There’s a dinner party scene in the 1980 experimental novel by Czech writer Milan Kundera On Laughter and Forgetting that sticks in my mind. The devil and an angel are sitting at the table, laughing: The devil laughs first because the world is chaos and the angel, unable to come up with something new and aware that the devil’s laughter is an act against god, begins laughing too, at how beautiful and rational the world is. The two emit the same sound, but the angel’s laugh, which is a bad copy, is laughable to the devil. He laughs louder still. “Those who consider the Devil a partisan of Evil and angels warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels,” writes Kundera. “Things are clearly more complicated.”...
“With the return of dirt comes redemption”1 There’s a dinner party scene in the 1980 experimental novel by Czech writer Milan Kundera On Laughter and Forgetting that sticks in my mind. The devil and an angel are sitting at the table, laughing: The devil laughs first because the world is chaos and the angel, unable to come up with something new and aware that the devil’s laughter is an act against god, begins laughing too, at how beautiful and rational the world is. The two emit the same sound, but the angel’s laugh, which is a bad copy, is laughable to the devil. He laughs louder still. “Those who consider the Devil a partisan of Evil and angels warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels,” writes Kundera. “Things are clearly more complicated.”...
