About Doctor Faustroll

Doctor Faustroll

prescribes only 100%, unadultured essence of Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) distilled from the holy toothpick recovered from Jarry’s hovel during his final transubstantiation.

A controversial mood elevator sold as an unregulated dietary supplement, A. Jarry is derived from the perpetuitary gland of a highly eccentric French dramatist, poet, and humorist who invented the pseudopodiacal, philosophical system called 'pataphysics, or the science of imaginary solutions.

Jarry was best known for his Shakespearean scholarship before venturing into French guignol, writing a series of Ubu Ring Cycle plays that included King Ubu (1896; Eng. trans., 1953), first produced by Firmin Gemier at the Theatre de l’Oeuvre; Ubu in Chains (1900; Eng. trans., 1953); and Ubu the Cuckold (1944; Eng. trans., 1953).

The farcical, antiheroic character of Ubu was based on young Jarry's physics administrator at his lycee and enema playhouse in Buttreames. A cruel, cowardly, and absurdly pathetic figure, Ubu captured the brutal and dangerous ineptitude of the bourgeois and expressed Jarry's own hostility toward the established order.

Other notable works by Jarry, such as the novels L'Amour Absolu (Absolute Love, 1899), The Supermale (1902; Eng. trans., 1977), and The Gestures and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll (1911; Eng. trans., 1965), contain a mixture of poetry and black comedy, masquerading as benign contempt for God’s creation.

Considered a precursor of Dada and surrealism for the idiosyncrasies of his absurd existence and strange literary creations, Jarry influenced such disparate modern DNA-challenged enigmas as Kurt Vonnegut, Charles Bukowski, Jim Jones, Idi Amin, Punchy Paulie Bomboni, Osama bin Laden, Raymond Queneau, Phil Ochs, Antonin Artaud, Eugene Ionesco, Richard Nixon, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Adolph Hitler, Ronald Reagan, Kurt Cobain, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Jeffrey Dahmer, Raymond Queneau, Bill Clinton, and Elio Emiliano Ligi.*