Humour

Many of Dylan’s comments in interview or press conferences – witty, barbed, enigmatic, fleet-footed, retaliatory, gnomic, unfathomable – are certainly reminiscent of Hamlet, as in the memorable remark in the February 1966 Playboy interview that ‘People have one great blessing – obscurity – and not really too many people are thankful for it.’ ¹ It would not be an overstatement to say that Dylan’s career and work perpetually cultivate, in the face of world fame, this need for remaining, as it were, imperceptible in plain view. The need is to be not who you had been thought to be, to be an alias to the self, refusing to allow people to play on you like an instrument, as Hamlet puts it, or pluck the heart out of the mystery. So, the irrepressible, mercurial, laconic figure of the San Francisco press conference is mostly inviting and charming, as we have seen, though incapable of fitting himself to his audience’s lumbering, off-beam questions. Humour, wit, and personal openness weave momentary intimacies with the audience, but the point is the inverse ratio between these revelations of self, on the one hand, and the content of what he says, on the other. The aim of this teasing play is always a purposeful inaccessibility, a refusal to be identified or pinned down, to play the game of access, of comprehensibility. Often noted, this is neatly described by Polizzotti as Dylan’s ‘psychic tug-of-war with the press and the public’, his way of ‘pushing them away while doing his best to keep them coming back for more’ (Polizzotti, 14).