Laughter and Joking in the Works of Heinrich von Kleist

Even a casual reader of Heinrich von Kleist's works will notice a persistently recurring feature: laughter and joking which seem inappropriate to the circumstances. The Marquise von 0... makes a joke about the pregnancy she fears so much when she first mentions it to her mother; Michael Kohlhaas smiles to himself at the Witz des diirren Junkers' which turns out to be the catalyst for the upheaval of his world and, with it, the entire Holy Roman Empire; a major crisis in the lives of the Prince of Homburg and his sovereign, the Elector, is precipitated by what is several times referred to as the jest (Scherz) which the Elector indulges in with the Prince in the opening scene of the play. A careful reading of all the stories and plays reveals that there are close to one hundred such references to laughter, joking, and related phenomena. Critics have paid little attention to this element in Kleist's work. For instance, although many have dealt with the Elector's joke, few have tried to determine why it is that the interaction between the two characters occurs precisely in the form of a joke, or what it tells us of the conflict between them.2 Even those critics more specifically concerned with the comic element, irony, and joking in Kleist's work have preferred to dwell on larger aesthetic formulations or on the philosophical implications of Kleist's humor.3 For Kleist, laughter usually appears in association with-and serves a function similar to-blushing, outbursts of anger, disintegration or even total loss of language, talk of dreams or intoxication or madness, fainting, and, finally, actual madness.4 In other words, laughter and joking belong among the many Gebdirden that interpreters have seen as an essential part of Kleist's work.5 These behavioral traits appear frequently enough to take on the character of leitmotifs, and we soon learn that each one signifies some level of danger or distress. While all of them arise from the same predicament-the experiencing of conflicting realities that is central to Kleist's work-they are not fully interchangeable, but should rather be seen as a hierarchy in the order listed above, with blushing and laughter occupying the first and second positions, and madness the last, or most extreme. While we need not go so far as to accord laughter the status of key to an understanding of Kleist's world, as Ditmar Skrotzki is inclined to do with

Art · Laughter · Literature · German Literature and Culture Studies · Linguistic research and analysis · Philosophy