David Foster Wallace - on Franz Kafka's ;funniness' and teaching that to students

"And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka's wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance.  It's not that students don't "get" kafka's humor, but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get--the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have.  No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke--that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inescapable from that horrific struggle.  That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.  It's hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me.  You can tell them that maybe it's good they don't "get" Kafka.  You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door.  To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc.  That, finally, the door opens...and it opens outward: we've been inside what we wanted all along.  Das ist komisch."

http://cliffordglee.com/Site/EXSupplementalReadings_files/DFWALLACEONKAFKA.pdf