Happy Birthday, Franz Kafka - You Old Joker

Kafka would have been 125 today, and in all the years since the end of his short life, he's gotten a bum rap as dark and humorless. Yet, when I read the Metamorphosis some years ago, I found it hilarious ... in a black comic way, of course. Here's a guy who's spent his whole life trying to be and do what everyone else would not, eating the emotional refuse of the world, and he turns into a giant bug. A friend of mine at the time told me that Kafka actually saw a lot of his work as humor.

It seems that others think so as well. An entry in the Guardian's book blog goes into this very issue:

Kafka's friend, Max Brod, talked of how Kafka found humour in his dark works - especially the chilling "The Trial", which he thought a hoot, laughing so hard while reading the first chapter aloud, that he repeatedly had to stop to collect himself.

He revelled in the comic absurdity of his characters, whether the trapeze artist who never descends, the hunger artist who starves himself to death or the boy who wakes up to discover he has turned into a beetle. "It's terribly funny in a very direct way," says Hans-Gerd Koch, another Kafka specialist. "Gregor Samsa [in The Metamorphosis] turns into a beetle who crawls along the wall and tries to work out how he should pack his suitcase."

See? How could anyone take that overly seriously?