The Laughter of Jacques Derrida

In the beginning was the joke, and the joke was in Franglais, and the joke brought everyone who heard it an unmistakable yield of pleasure. It was as if a treasure chest of mirth buried deep within him had suddenly disgorged its contents. I would not venture to say that laughter is what is proper to man, but it was definitely proper to this man: Jacques Derrida was possessed of that rare and precious gift that Freud calls die humoristische Einstellung, the ‘humourous attitude’. I don’t remember the exact wording of the joke (whose punch line is now the title of a book) or why it imposed itself on him at that particular moment. But all at once the joke was there, at the beginning of dinner. Perhaps he wanted to make light of the fact that the restaurant at the Baltimore Colonnade Hotel was more of a dive than an eatery? Or perhaps it was his witty repartee to the then Director of the Hopkins Humanities Center, Michael Fried, whose best shot at introducing him earlier that afternoon had been to say that Jacques Derrida was a ‘man in need of no introduction’ and who had then proceeded to sit down without introducing him. Whatever it was, I recall that the joke was an immediate success and that all of us at dinner — we were a small group of graduate students and faculty at Johns Hopkins — were promptly released from the cares and vexations of academic reality. So here’s the joke: A man is sitting in a restaurant, having dinner, when suddenly a giant panda (un gros panda) comes in and orders a meal.The panda sits down, eats, then stands up, fires a gun, and runs out of the restaurant. The man is astonished. ‘What the hell is going on?’ he asks the waiter. The waiter, in a flat and unsurprised voice, tells him to go check the dictionary. The man goes home, takes

Aesthetics · Art · Laughter · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology