Feeling

Another playwright testifying in court - before which he had been summoned by an aggrieved theatergoer who felt himself denigrated by the playwright on the stage of the Bochum theater, which the playwright, even in front of the court, kept referring to as the Bochum lunatic asylum, in which, he stated, there were really no actors but only fools sustained by the director of a lunatic asylum who was merely pretending to be a theater manager, performing throughout the year to an uncomprehending audience - stated that he enjoyed such great success only because, in contrast to his unsuccessful colleagues, he was honest enough to pretend that his comedies were always tragedies and his tragedies comedies. When he had, on one occasion, actually called a tragedy a tragedy, he had suffered a tremendous failure. From that time on he had stuck to his principle of pertending a comedy was a tragedy and a tragedy a comedy, and he was assured success on each occasion. Because he had become so famous in the meantime that he could afford to do almost anything he wanted, the court, to which he had been summoned by the aggrieved theatergoer, acquitted him because he had called the theatergoer just as stupid as all the other theatergoers in the world, who are numbered in the millions. After the proceedings the playwright maintained that the presiding judge had acquitted him because he, the presiding judge, hated the theater and everything connected with it more than anything in the world, which he, the playwright, could well understand because that was his own feeling.

From The Voice Imitator: 104 Stories by Thomas Bernhard

Illustration by Espen Terjesen, borrowed from A Piece of Monologue.