COLGR49: "ha, ha"

[David Morris]

This does sound like fun.  Thanks.

http://www.disinfo.com/pages/dossier/id975/pg1/

Merdre
~~ Pere Ubu, King Ubu

And so Pere Ubu issued the very word that the finally threw the audience at 
the Theatre de l'Oeuvre into a frothing frenzy, during the 1896 staging of 
Alfred Jarry's (1873-1907) infamous Ubu Roi. The Parisians didn't take well 
to the absurd affront delivered upon them by the bold 23 year-old 
playwright. This broadside of "Shite!" successfully outraged the bourgeois, 
and shot Jarry to strange stardom aboard a wave of scandal.

The Ubu plays came as a cultural shock to the smug chattering classes. He 
created a world where no meant yes, where parody became reality, and where 
artistically, no tribute was paid to the history of theatre. In Jarry's 
theatre, the characters are shockingly dehumanised until they are mere 
marionettes, language is twisted, and nothing is preached. The theatre-goer 
is left to their own devices when it comes to understanding the 'message of 
the plays', or discerning whether or not one even exists. Ubu, Jarry's main 
character, had appeared before, in the playwright's schooldays, when he and 
his friends constructed elaborate puppet shows, parodying their teachers. It 
is only here that we can draw the ancient tradition which Jarry mined - the 
grotesque humour of a beachside Punch and Judy show.

[...]
posthumously published _Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, 
Pataphysician_, an absurd novel about Dr. Faustroll, who with his baboon and 
summons-server (who was trying to evict him at the start of the book) travel 
across strange lands in their sieve in search of 'Pataphysical solutions - 
'Pataphysics being "the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically 
attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to 
their lineaments." On his way to eternity, Faustroll proves that "God equals 
the tangential point between zero and infinity."

And what of the man, Jarry? Under five feet tall, he habitually dressed in 
black cycle-racing clothing, grooming himself like Mephisto in miniature. A 
serious eccentrics he took very seriously the art of taking nothing 
seriously, and referred to himself in the third person. As if this wasn't 
enough, he referred to his bicycle as "that which rolls," and the fish which 
he caught in the Seine as "that which swims." He ate his meals in reverse, 
desert first.

[...]
He fell ill, mainly from his absinthe drinking and ether sniffing, at the 
age of 34, and had himself photographed as a corpse, so that he could send 
postcards to his friends. Eventually, he was overcome by tubercular 
meningitis, and lapsed into a coma, waking momentarily before death to call, 
not for a priest or absinthe, but for a toothpick . . .






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