'Other Words for Funny': Will Self, Kafka, and the German-English humour gap

Will Self, not for the first time in his long and storied career, is not amused. He's at City University, talking about Kafka's Metamorphosis, and poor Gregor Samsa running all over the flat in the form of an unidentified verminous creature, bizarrely worried that he might be about to lose his job. Self's face is a mask of pain and horror as he recounts the tale, concluding, '...and that's. Not. Funny'. By this time, though, the audience are laughing about as uproariously as one can in a lecture theatre, and it looks like Will Self is wrong.

For the past few weeks, Self has been working on a 'digital literary essay', commissioned by the London Review of Books and swishy new multimedia arts platform The Space. The idea is to explore Kafka's distinctly unsettling short story A Country Doctor. Last Thursday I headed to City University to see Self discuss the project with prominent academics and translators - Susan Hopkinson, City's Professor of Literary Translation; Dr Karin Seago, director of the University's MA in Translating Popular Culture; Anthea Bell, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for her translation of W G Sebald's Austerlitz; and Joyce Crick, translator most recently of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Kafka's selected tales, A Hunger Artist and other stories.

A Country Doctor epitomises everything that's terrifying, visceral and dreamlike in Kafka's short fiction: the eponymous doctor finds himself called out on a night visit in a howling snowstorm, his horse having died of neglect in the night. Bizarrely, he finds new horses in his pigsty, and unsuccessfully tries to prevent a sexual assault on his housemaid before being carried helplessly into the storm. Arriving at the patient's house, he finds a young man afflicted by a terrible wound, described in graphic detail, in which many-legged worms are writhing. The doctor can do nothing for him; the disappointed peasants strip him, lay him in bed with the invalid, and then chase him back out into the storm naked and freezing. Like much of Kafka's work, it quite literally defies any attempt to make sense of it, but Self makes a valiant attempt, and if anyone's up to the job it's him: his own works have the same conflation of dream-logic, body horror and grimly fatalistic humour, and his public persona - slouching cadaverously about the stage like a lugubrio-comic prophet of the macabre - is perfectly suited to the material. He's keen to protest that he's not a translator, and has nothing but a kind of uncomprehending awe for the translator's task: his role here alongside world-renowned practitioners, he says, is as a useful foil, 'a kind of Czech or Prague-like Golem of stupidness'.

He's wrong about being stupid, but he's right about the knowledge gap. Faced with what translators do and what it means to experience life and literature in a language we don't know, we're all condemned to a certain amount of incomprehension. There's no better illustration of this than what we do and don't find funny.  It has never occurred to me - and, despite the similarities in his own work, it has clearly never occurred to Will Self - that Kafka is a fundamentally comic writer, but the German speakers on the panel, and most of those in the audience, confirm that, indeed, he's uproarious. The anecdote of Kafka reading his stories aloud in Prague to the accompaniment of his friends' helpless laughter is trundled out again and again. Self puts the Anglophone position quite well: the anecdote he finds 'utterly perplexing'; the humour in Kafka, he says, is at most productive of 'a wry twist of the lip rather than a deep and throaty guffaw'.

In the end, though, Self's semi-serious refusal to accept even the possibility of genuine belly-laughs in stories like A Country Doctor provides just the prick for his panel of translators to kick against. Joyce Crick and Anthea Bell, speaking from a lifetime of experience, pick carefully through the tale and make it live in two languages at once. More astoundingly, they succeed in convincing me - and, I suspect, every other non-German speaker in the hall, with the exception of an increasingly wild-eyed Self - that Kafka is in fact deeply funny, even in English. Not in the jovial, punchline-rich way that the English like to call humour to the exclusion of much else, but in a subtler manner that makes the German-speaking world look quite a bit more sophisticated: a comedy of absurdity, misdirection and violent incongruity: more League of Gentlemen than Catherine Tate, more Ionesco than Peter Kay. Joyce Crick nails it when, choosing her words carefully and with only the slightest hint of a smile, she suggests that, perhaps, "we need some other words for funny". The problem isn't Kafka: it's us, playing out our own little comedy of misdirection and bafflement. Whether the man himself would have found this funny isn't clear; his picture is projected on the wall behind the panel, face slightly vulpine, hair impeccably combed, expression deadpan as Buster Keaton. He doesn't crack a smile.

This panel event should be up online on The Space's website in July, when the project goes live; in the meantime, Will Self's blog can be read here