ABSTRACT
Kierkegaard has been called “the funniest man in Denmark”!2 If this is true, it must mean, according to Kierkegaard’s own pseudonymous theory of the comic, which is developed in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), that he was also the most serious man. For, as he has Johannes Climacus emphasize, the greater the comical force, the deeper the seriousness, and vice versa: the truer the pathos, the more vis comica. One gladly grants him this elastic unity of reflection (comic) and ethicalreligious pathos (seriousness).
