Like choosing to walk upright or on one’s hands, everything has a flip side, a counter opposite. It is the play between these opposites that David Grossman explores in A Horse Walks into a Bar. The genesis of humor is embedded in the polarity of the unexpected opposite. The punchline of the joke in the novel’s title is never rendered in the novel, but the reader knows the joke rides on its unexpected premise. By the same token, the page-turning response of the reader is a direct result of the rhetorical technique of the novel, the juxtaposition of the ridiculous and the deadly serious.

The comic and the tragic are worked out in a single set of the comedian, a single performance in time. Grossman has said that the nucleus of his tale–a young boy not knowing which parent’s funeral he is about to attend–had rattled around in his head for years while he sought the vehicle for its artistic realization. The choice of a comic’s voice could have rendered the dismissal of slapstick or the sentimentality of the confessional, but the genius of the writing, carefully modulated between farce and pathos, realized the poignancy of tragic depth. The reader watches the performance of an artist unravel with the same morbid fascination that causes us to pick at a scab.

Time spins backward as shtick morphs into confessional memoir, sub-levels of consciousness exposed. The artistry of the narrative rides on much more than the single dramatic elements of performance and audience. That these are realized through the lens of one member of the audience adds depth and consequence. The judge, a long-ago friend of the comedian, views the performance from both present and past, objectivity and subjectivity. He is the arm of justice twisted into its moral ambiguity as he struggles to accommodate a moment of adolescent betrayal. As focal intelligence, he represents a polar opposite to another intent listener, the dwarfed medium befriended in a web of childhood persecution. She plays agape to his legality. Both are the shadows teased into the comic Dovelah’s matriarchal/patriarchal light on the road to Jerusalem. They are players in the final resurrection.