A Leak In The Safe

Aristophanes shows us the most hideous images of human madness only in the laughing mirror of wit; Goethe ventures to utter the agony of the thinker who understands his own nullity only in the doggerel verses of a puppet-play; and Shakespeare places the most deadly lament about the misery of the world in the mouth of a fool, shaking his cap and bells in terror. They have all modeled themselves on the great primal poet, whose world tragedy in a thousand acts carries humor to its highest pitch. As we see every day: after the death of the hero the clowns and buffoons come on stage with their custard pies, after the bloody revolution scenes and the imperial action the fat Bourbons come waddling along with their stale jokes and delicately legitimate bon mots, and the old noblesse come gracefully mincing with their half-starved smiles, and after them troop the pious monks in their cowl with candles, crosses and banners; – touches of comedy tend to creep even into the supreme pathos of the world tragedy, the despairing republican who plunges a dagger into his heart, like Brutus, may have smelt the dagger beforehand in case it had been used to cut up a herring, and the world’s great stage is just like our small-town theaters in other respects: it too has drunken heroes, kings who forget their lines, backdrops that get stuck, prompters with voices everyone can hear, dancers who rely on the poetic effect of their thighs, costumes which are shiny and not much else – And up in heaven, in the front row of the stalls, sit the little angels, eyeing us earthly comedians through their opera-glasses, and God sits solemnly in his box, perhaps bored, or calculating that this theater cannot stay in business much longer, since one actor is paid too much and another too little, and all of them act execrably.

– Heinrich Heine