Kafka’s Seinfeldian Humor

ABSTRACT This article looks at Kafka’s writing as profoundly ambivalent. This ambivalence is articulated within the text as a disjunction between what is promised or expected in the text and what is actually produced and interpreted. I draw comparisons between Kafka and the American television series Seinfeld, where I focus on the disjunction between the order that is demanded of us and the lawlessness of existence. Here, the tragic is transformed into the comic: Kafka’s heroes do not set themselves valiantly against the cruel orders of fate. They find themselves subjected to scenes of hope, of waiting, or promise, of apparent (yet endlessly deferred) revelation. Seinfeld not only allows us to think of Kafka differently, but – more importantly – it allows the problem of humor to generate new ways of thinking about authority and reading.