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"Rabelais's Merry epic has turned into the despairing comedy of Ionesco, who says, 'There's only a thin line between the horrible and the comic' The European history of laughter comes to an end."
-MILAN KUNDERA
(TESTAMENTS BETRAYED 35)
"Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear?"
-MILAN KUNDERA
(SLOWNESS 4)
While there are certainly funnier writers than Milan Kundera, probably no major modern author of fiction has pursued the subjects of humor and laughter as persistently and thoroughly as the writer of Laughable Loves, The Joke and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. It is ironic then that at the very beginning of his extended treatise on modern aesthetics, Testaments Betrayed(1993), Kundera observes, "IfI were asked the most common cause of misunderstanding between my readers and me, I would not hesitate: humor" (6). The entire book then becomes in a sense a clarification of his position on the subject, but not before he has articulated what is at stake for him in all this by referencing Octavio Paz's assertion that "Humor is the great invention of the modern spirit" and by claiming that this humor's birth, coinciding with that of the novel in Rabelais and Cervantes, is absolutely fundamental to modern European culture (5).
It is perhaps because such aesthetic, social and moral elevation of humor is inevitably attended by a concern for its well-being that the subject has remained, thematically and as a structural principle, at the core of Kundera's work. However, Kundera's history and aesthetics of humor are also inseparable from his own biography, as the writer himself claimed in a New York Times interview with Philip Roth in 1980.
I learned the value of humor during the time of Stalinist terror. I was twenty then. I could always recognize a person who was not a Stalinist, a person whom I needn't fear, by the way he smiled. A sense of humor was a trustworthy sign of recognition. Ever since, I have been terrified by a world that is losing its sense of humor. (Laughter and Forgetting 232)
Here Kundera not only provides a readily comprehensible biographical context-a Czech's experience of Soviet domination-but also an indication of his own understanding of that slippery term "humor."...