Early in my teaching career, two students independently came up to me to thank me for having set the essay on “Crop Rotation” from Either/Or as essential reading for that week. This, they said, was the first piece of philosophical writing they had been set in three years of university study that had made them laugh out loud.

Kierkegaard can be funny. This assertion will strike some as surprising, others as a statement of the obvious. To anyone familiar with the witty, amusing prose of which he is capable, Kierkegaard's popular reputation as the “melancholy Dane” has always seemed somewhat ironic. In Kierkegaard we read of the Paraguayan tribe so apathetic that visiting Jesuit missionaries found it necessary to ring a bell at midnight to remind the men to attend to their marital duties; of a literary culture so willing to accept second-hand opinions that a book could be published, reviewed, and cause a sensation without having actually been written; and of authors in a small country commenting on each other's books as akin to two fat princes who take their exercise by walking around one another. Perhaps my favorite is the story of the barefoot peasant who comes to town and makes so much money that he can afford to buy new shoes and stockings and still have enough left to get drunk. On the way home, inebriated, he lies down in the middle of the road and falls asleep.