Queneau contre les humoristes : pour en finir avec le « petit paravent humour »

Abstract Raymond Queneau’s postwar reputation as comic author belies the suspicion the writer brought to a negativistic stripe of humor rooted in fin-de-siècle French cabarets and Jarry’s circle. In the polemical essay of 1938 “L’humour et ses victimes,” Queneau exposes the limitations of “perpetual humor,” which he claims must be replaced by a measured form of irony, the creative energies unleashed in Europe by Dada having long since run their course. The matrix of the Aesopic fable allows the essayist to lay bare, through the figure of gonflement, the crass self-importance of contemporary French humorists and to establish the grounds for a re-humanized space of creation wherein humor equates with wisdom, in Hegel’s sense of the end of History.