Authors

We could search for the roots of Jan Vodňanský’s work in Voskovec and Werich, in the poetics of Dada, poetism or pataphysics. Indeed the author’s particular sense for mischief, irony and parody, whose dominant feature became oscillating between a posture of nonsense and quasi-scientific rhetoric, further gave rise to a wholly original variety of intellectual humour.
The artist’s one-time stage colleague Přemysl Rut sees the basic starting point of Vodňanský’s method in a collage which reflects a sort of “idiocy of over-informedness”. As in a bizarre kaleidoscope, there intermingle “fragments of pop songs, scraps of fairy tales, the remnants of so-called general education, the rhetorical doublespeak of propaganda, instruction manuals, recipes, adverts, the witticisms of popular well-known figures, the jargon of reporters and presenters, verbal stereotypes and automatisms… Vodňanský never shows us a thing in its apparent simplicity, always only crookedly reflected in literature, in science or in journalism, or sublimated in a mood, in a sort of nostalgia for things.” In the subtext of his spontaneous playfulness, therefore, we can always glimpse a sceptical-ironical demasking of the banality and absurdity of the modern world.
Vodňanský’s song lyrics originate primarily from verbal and musical buffoonery – with the result that the author’s literary activities cannot be entirely separated from their original theatrical performance. Often the whole “story” of a song unfolds from an initial sudden rhyming idea: “In Prague’s Kotce, so we hear /You can buy yourself an external ear…” Hand in hand with this wordplay go unusual themes (such as a cosmic classmate, a hermaphrodite conscientious objector, an analysis of the Holy Father’s urine, a gorilla who makes toast, etc). The world of Vodňanský’s songs is a world of curious characters (often from the animal kingdom) and grotesque catastrophes. Sometimes the author also deliberately parodies the pathos of poetry and especially the sentimentality of pop songs. He usually balances on the edge of a wistful melancholy and absurdity, with such texts making up the larger part of his repertoire. For example, in the song Maršálové (The Marshals), which evokes with a bookishly refined vocabulary the atmosphere of a celebratory ball, awaiting the arrival of the marshals – the author is sparing in his description of the situation, so that the listener can imagine that behind this retinue of military bigwigs lie all sorts of horrors of history, or whatever else is stirred up in the imagination. As far as form is concerned, Vodňanský, together with kindred music composers, tears down the well-worn facade of the song and its cliches, and intersperses compositions with all manner of discourses, foreign-language interludes (especially in Russian, which produce a spontaeous satirical effect) and so on.
Another aspect of Vodňanský’s humour, which relies on an audience with a slightly above-average education, consists of pataphysical lectures. The author applies the conceptual apparatus of modern philosophy and psychology (especially psychoanalysis) to inappropriate entities like nieces, fairy-tale characters, spies, protagonists from The Bartered Bride, from Božena Němcová’s Babička (Grandmother) and so on. The thorough scientific grounding constrasts with the absurdity of the topic, which further strengthens the author’s stylization as a dedicated teacher and cultural educator. The artist’s abundant commentary on his own showmanship and the actual stage production also contributes to this misappropriating effect . As with a few other older home-grown entertainers, a genuinely absurd Dadaistic humour is also intrinsic to Vodňanský. It is particularly striking in the short poems or two-line poems of the type “What happened to the professor / he was stuffed in the compressor”, some of which became popular. His writing for children also fits with this aspect of playful and poetic nonsense.
Since the revolution of 1989 Jan Vodňanský’s work has concentrated more on political satire. The author has also published memoir-based texts, in which he primarily records his artistic activities. Although during normalization he could only publish books for children, today several compilations of his works are being brought out. Critics have noted in some of the new texts a retreat towards a less demanding brand of humour, flirting more or less in good taste with erotica and more frequently employing vulgarities or trivial wordplay.

(jn)
This profile was last updated on 1st January 2008