Indeed, Dylan’s quicksilver humour in its mid-60s heyday is so rich, so varied, so far-reaching and inventive a resource, that it could provide a study in its own right. Usually delivered straightfaced and deadpan, Dylan is like a matador deftly side-stepping the antagonist who wishes to impale him, before retaliating unseen. It is usually an expectation embedded in the question that is exposed by Dylan’s fugitive wit, and the laughter carries an exhilarating dividend, as the terms of the discussion are turned over and assumptions are laid belly-up. Often, the humour is further compounded by the confusion, pomposity, or obtuseness of the questioner who ploughs on, seemingly oblivious, but reduced now to coming across as merely condescending, or else desperately intent on ignoring the emptiness of his own words. This kind of verbal confrontation is clear in these exchanges from the opening minutes of the Los Angeles press conference of 16 December 1965.2 Dylan is noticeably less personable, and his humour more barbed, than in San Francisco not two weeks previously:

Dylan’s gift for straight-face repartee reveals what is socially determined in the question through an excess of definition or weirdness that blows the questioners’ circuits. He divests the interviewer’s words of their conventional supports, and reveals how coercive the questions actually are. In so doing, he both lays bare how desperate is the journalist’s blind need for definition and fact, while also showing how far this is bound up with paranoid fantasy and normative pressure. The interviewer is left like a cartoon character, panicking in mid-air as the ground disappears beneath his feet. Certainly, he is unable to emulate Dylan’s own

virtuosity or agility in improvising, as the singer jumps stag-like from remark to remark, often capping himself in the process (‘No, I’m gonna play my mother’).