["I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting, or, Looking at Kafka"] is a masterful example of comedy. Roth uses cliché and fantasy, movies and spiritual longing, documentary and imagination, to construct a work which refuses to sit still. It is a dream-like marriage of opposing tendencies, texts, and "worlds," and in its striking way, it brings us closer to Roth's own life and style.

But the piece tells us much about the comic process. I believe that Roth implies a union in comedy. We laugh at a man slipping on a banana peel—or Kafka slipping into "normalcy"—because we connect events before and after the fall. There must, in fact, be a fall, an unbalancing which "dislocates" usual positions, roles, visions, but it cannot dominate the action; if it were to be "all," we would be merely horrified. We laugh, however, when we think of (con...