INTERVIEWER: Do you think that is something that is true? That humor can only come out of something sad? I know that Wittgenstein believed that the most serious and profound problems and questions and issues could be discussed only in the form of jokes. I know in U.S. literature there is a tradition from about the 50s and 60s called “black humor,” which is a very kind of sardonic sad type of humor.

DFW: I’m grasping for something interesting to say in response. I think probably sometimes it can be and sometimes it isn’t. There are forms of humor that offer escapes from pain. And there are forms of humor that transfigure pain. You know what would help me? Tell me what you think. If we do this as a conversation it will be easier for me.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, sure. And, you know, I wrote my Master’s Thesis about Thomas Bernhard. And Thomas Bernhard has a theory that, you know, he was very, he had this lung sickness so he couldn’t breathe all his life. His life was very hard for him. And also he hated Austria, where he lived. And he thought they were all Nazis. There was all this Catholic fascism. And he was just hating everything, but then out of that he developed this really strange sense of humor. So his novels are very dark, but at the same time, for me, very witty. And I just wanted to know if you think that is true that the kind of sense of humor that you like comes out of this bitterness and sadness.

DFW: The answer for myself is I don’t know. I know that very often, humor is a response to things that are difficult. In the U.S. there’s a strange situation where in some respects, humor and irony are political responses and they’re reductive. And in another sense, particularly in popular entertainment, irony and a kind of dark humor can become a way of—it’s pretending to protest when it really isn’t. Someone once called irony the song of a bird that has come to love its cage. And even though it sings about not liking the cage, it really likes it in there. So that it can be both a wake-up call and an anesthetic. And the difference in the U.S. now is very tricky and very complicated, it seems to me.

INTERVIEWER: And what would you think is true for your books? For me, they have very serious questions. And they are often very sad, but at the same time you get the sense of humor in there somehow.

DFW: I’m not often all that aware of stuff that’s really funny in the book. In the American version of Infinite Jest, I set out to write a sad book. And when people liked it and told me the thing they liked about it was that it was so funny, it was just very surprising. It’s the other strange thing about humor. I teach school and I teach literature and some of what I teach is Kafka. And there’s a story about Kafka, that in some of Kafka’s most horrific stories his neighbors would complain, because he would be laughing so hard late at night, as he wrote these stories. He found them very, very funny and there are things in them that are funny, but I don’t know that many people would understand laughing so hard that your neighbors would complain. So there’s something. It’s probably difficult to talk to a writer about the humor or sadness or something in his or her own work, because our sense of it tends to be very different from readers.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, but there was one interview you gave, I forgot which media it was, but you said, when you began writing Infinite Jest, you wanted to write something about sadness. So sadness was something that really belonged to this project. So, could you describe?

DFW: It was a while ago. The easiest way to talk about it would be that for the upper-middle class in the US, particularly younger people, things are often, materially, very comfortable. And there’s also often a great sadness and emptiness. I think I had started that book after a couple of people, not close friends, but people I knew who were my age had committed suicide. It just became obvious that something was going on. And so I know that that impulse was part of starting the book. I think one of the ideas in the book is that there’s a particular ethos in U.S. culture, especially in entertainment and marketing culture. That very much appeals to people as individuals, that you don’t have to be devoted or subservient to anything else. There is no larger good than your own good and your own happiness. Characters who become drug addicts—there is a form, that the root in English of addict is the Latin, addicere, which means religious devotion. It was an attribute of beginning monks, I think. We all worship and we all have a religious impulse. We can choose to an extent what we worship, but the myth that we worship nothing and give ourselves away to nothing simply sets us up to give ourselves away to something different. For instance, pleasure or drugs.

INTERVIEWER: And what happens when this ideology becomes—

INTERVIEWER (Sound Guy): Sorry, sorry. I got to switch this battery out.

DFW: Shit, I was halfway lucid for a second there too.

INTERVIEWER (Sound Guy): No, it was fine. I promise, it was fine. But it’s kind of hard because he moves in and out. Because you’re pontificating. In a very deep, spiritual way. Which is completely screwing me. You are, you’re just, I can tell, you’re very… reflective.

DFW: Twitchy. Well these are hard questions. Particularly when it’s about something you did seven years ago. I would trade places with you at this moment.

INTERVIEWER: What do you think? Does this ideology, when children are told from the beginning everything that counts as your own happiness and your own pursuit of satisfaction?

DFW: Well, of course, nobody tells you. Mom and dad don’t sit you down and say this. This is something very subtle and is delivered by a great many messages. This is one enormous engine and temple of self-gratification and self-advancement. And in some ways it works very well. In other ways, it doesn’t work all that well, because, at least for me, it seems as if there are whole other parts of me that need to worry about things larger than me that don’t get nourished in that system. The idea that America is one great big shopping mall and that all anyone wants to do is grasp their credit card and run out and buy stuff is a stereotype and it’s a generalization. But as a way to summarize a certain kind of ethos in the U.S., it’s pretty accurate.

INTERVIEWER: I’ve been coming here every year and I seemed to see some progress in that. This development. When you go to a department store, people seem more aggressive in trying to sell you stuff. And also an intellectual crisis and everything. It stands still somehow.

DFW: There are certain paradoxes that go along with being a wealthy Western industrial country and it just seems that they’re probably somewhat common. One of the reasons for setting the book in the future was that I’m now 40, so I was born in the early 60s, and to an extent, I think my generation tends to think of itself as children still and as people with parents. I remember wanting to do something about what would be the situation of our children. Kind of in the next generation.

INTERVIEWER: And this childlike thing also has something. Language like that, the wounded inner child, the inner pain is part of a kind of pop psychological movement in the United States that is a sort of popular Freudianism that has its own paradox which is that the more we are taught to list and resent the things of which we were deprived as children, the more we live in that anger and frustration and the more we remain children.

DFW: Let me insert one thing. To the extent that I understand it, being what you call “grown-up” isn’t a lot of fun a lot of the time. There’s a streak of moralism in American life that extols the virtues of being grown up, but there’s also the sense of do what you want, gratify your appetites, because when I’m a corporation, appealing to the parts of you that are selfish and self-centered and want to have fun all the time is the best way to sell you things. Right? We see it with children. That’s not happiness. That feeling of having to obey every impulse and gratify every desire. It seems to me to be a strange kind of slavery. Nobody talks about it as such though. It talks about the freedom of choice.

INTERVIEWER: It’s not only a problem in the U.S., because everything that happens here is copied by people in Germany and there is always this impulse that you only have to do what makes you happy and forget about all the others.

DFW: And it works very well as a system for running an economy. The ways in which it doesn’t work are much more difficult to talk about. The word “citizen,” the idea of being a citizen, it would be to understand your country’s history and taking the trouble to learn about candidates for political office, which means often reading stuff which isn’t fun. But when people don’t do that, the candidates win who have the most money to buy television advertisements, because television advertisements are all most voters know about the candidates. Therefore we get candidates who are beholden to large donors, and become, in some ways, corrupt, which disgusts the voters and makes the voters even less interested in politics. Talking about this now, I feel ashamed, because my saying all this sounds to me like an older person saying this, like a person lecturing, which in American culture sets me up to be ridiculed.

INTERVIEWER: No, but it’s the same dilemma actually in Germany.

DFW: The paradox is that that sort of tension and complication and conflict in people also makes them very easy to market to. Because I can say to you, “Feeling uneasy? Life feels empty? Well, here’s something you can buy or something you can go do.”

INTERVIEWER: Even so-called serious literature… Books who are serious also have to be very entertaining and you don’t want to be bored.

DFW: There’s a real split in U.S. literature between commercial literature, novels like Crichton writes, Stephen King, and then there is still a small pocket of readers who have been taught the pleasures of hard work in reading. Serious stuff which is harder and stranger has always played to a much smaller audience. Reading requires sitting alone by yourself in a quiet room and I have friends who don’t like to read because there’s an almost dread that comes up here about having to be alone and having to be quiet. We don’t want things to be quiet ever anymore. Computer and internet culture, everything is so fast. And the faster things go, the more we feed that part of ourselves, but don’t feed the part of ourselves that can live in quiet. Without any kind of stimulation.

INTERVIEWER: I have a friend and she has multiple sclerosis. She calls me and instantly begins to talk about her sickness.

DFW: Imagine though, if she called you up, late at night, and talked to you for two hours and it was mostly apologizing for bothering you. So that it’s just one more layer of frosting. There’s a lot of narcissism in self-hatred. I have a friend who lost her mother, sister, father, to cancer, all within three years. My heart would sink every time… because it was always painful. I’d rather drink my chocolate milk and read a comic book than hear about unpleasant stuff. I don’t have a TV. Because if I have a TV, I will watch it all the time.

INTERVIEWER: But is the entertainment in Infinite Jest like TV as in America today?

DFW: Part of the allure of both drugs and entertainment is escape from my problems and my life and having to be stuck in here. I can pretend I’m James Bond or someone. Drug use is a pretty natural extension of corporate capitalist logic, which is, I want to feel exactly the way I want to feel. Most of the problems in my life have to do with my confusing what I want and what I need. Remote controls make it stressful because I become convinced there’s something really good on another channel and that I’m missing it. And so instead of watching, I’m scanning anxiously. That was the problem, when it became easy. You just had to move your thumb and change it. That’s when we were screwed.

INTERVIEWER: Is entertainment something we have to fight against?

DFW: Who would say entertainment is bad? But a model of life in which I have a right to be entertained all the time seems to me not to be a promising one. Right? One of the insidious things about it is that entertainment is so god damn entertaining. If fighting against entertainment is even required, how does one do it? You find some way to make the attack on entertainment entertaining, in which case you’ve been captured by the very thing you’re fighting against.

INTERVIEWER: Why did you relate the three together—tennis, boxing, and chess?

DFW: Tennis is a very beautiful sport because it’s very abstract and geometrical and tactical like chess. And it’s also very physical. It’s combat at a distance. I’m trying to beat you, but you’re 75 feet away from me and what’s traveling between us is just this small thing.

INTERVIEWER: What is literature able to do that other things can’t?

DFW: Literature allows me to jump over that wall of self and inhabit somebody else in a way that I can’t in regular life. There’s a tremendous reassurance about that kind of communion and empathy. Watching television for me, although it’s easier, is much lonelier. Knowing what it is like to be inside somebody else’s skin or knowing what it is like to be able to spend two hours with an author… it just seems like a form of magic to me.

INTERVIEWER: Is there fear of the writer that his work and his persona are made banal and abused as soon as the media—

DFW: I’m going to talk about the difficulties of having to deal with the media, but I’m talking to the media. If I were the viewer, I would go, “So why is the son of a bitch on camera?” Literary stuff loses money for corporate publishers almost all the time. One of the ways they try to keep from losing money is marketing this stuff. Going around and reading in bookstores, it’s turning writers into kind of penny-ante or cheap versions of celebrities. People aren’t usually coming out to hear you read, they’re coming out to see what you look like. It’s icky.

INTERVIEWER: You spoke in an interview about existential loneliness.

DFW: There’s something painful about being stuck in a body and a consciousness that can’t ever be inside anybody else’s. Art has this magical thing of, for a moment, there’s a kind of reconciliation and communion. But when I hear the word “existential,” now, half of me rolls my eyes. It becomes hard to speak seriously about it, because all I can hear is being made fun of for how serious and boring and dull I’m being.

INTERVIEWER: Most of the time people have really good educations, and then you have the feeling of not doing anything with your life.

DFW: In the U.S., you study the liberal arts—philosophy, classical stuff—and from that, you go to a specialized school to learn how to sue people or to figure out how to write copy that will make people buy a certain kind of SUV. As we get older, we have to do things to get money to stay alive, and there are things about that that often feel very wrong to us. If there’s something that characterizes our generation, it is that we’re endlessly verbal about our complaints.

INTERVIEWER: What do you think it will be like in a couple of decades from now in America?

DFW: I’m scared. The country’s reaction to feeling frightened and insecure is to buy Sports Utility Vehicles that are large and massive and tank-like. No one here is talking about the connection between how we live and what we drive and the things that are happening. I am, as an American, more scared of us than I am of anybody else.

INTERVIEWER: Are there any means of rebellion?

DFW: The people I know who are rebelling meaningfully don’t buy a lot of stuff and don’t get their view of the world from television. They are willing to spend four or five hours researching an election rather than going by commercials. My guess is the forms of rebellion that will end up changing anything meaningfully here will be very quiet and very individual.

INTERVIEWER: How do we get rid of this love for attractiveness?

DFW: Mass entertainment has to find things that a lot of people have in common. What most of us have in common here are our very most base, uninteresting, selfish, stupid interests. Physical attractiveness. Sex. Easy humor. It’s possible that if entertainment can get more niche, these companies can stay alive and make money without having to appeal to ten or twenty million people by pitching their appeal very, very low.