Reading The Brothers Karamazov: Dostoevsky’s Humor

[Read prior posts on this novel.]

As I have said, my first three times through The Brothers Karamazov were in the MacAndrew translation (1970). A perfectly splendid work overall, though looking back I can see it cost me something in certain chapters. My first two readings were before I went to India forty years ago. This was serious literature and I read it that way. I saw no humor in it at all. There were spiritual nuggets to be found. MacAndrew does not bring the humor to life like the newer translations.

Then in 2022 I got around to reading MacAndrew again. And I noticed a couple of humorous moments. These exploded in 2026 when I discovered Dostoevsky to be flat-out funny. That is in part due to newer translations. I stumbled across the Katz 2024 translation after reading PV and McDuff simultaneously. PV was funny-ish, McDuff was noticeably funnier but the humor becomes crystal clear in Katz. Large sections of the novel loosen, not the whole thing, but clearly there is some relief offered from the heaviness of the work. Characters overshoot themselves in ways I had never noticed before. By the time I reached the cell scene in Book XI, I was laughing. Actually laughing. At Dostoevsky.

Above all else, The Brothers Karamazov is entertaining and brilliantly written. Passion, drama, intrigue, scandal — it has all of that in abundance in prose that is amazing in its psychological revelation and impact. People talk about it like a granite block of suffering you have to get through. It is not that. It moves. It breathes. It performs. And running alongside all that dramatic intensity, if you tune your ear to it, is a persistent undercurrent of humor. Only took me almost 45 years to find it.

Two signals of humor fill the text itself. The first is the literal “ha, ha, ha” — Katz keeps them, as does McDuff, scattered through three dozen or so moments in the novel, most of them clustered around Dmitri. They are not just reactions. They are a rhythm. Dostoevsky uses ha-ha-ha almost as punctuation, the release valve separated by dozens of pages when a character’s internal pressure spikes past what language can hold.

Then there is “and so on and so forth.” It appears whenever Dostoevsky either feels he is getting too long-winded or simply does not want to bother with the details — contradictory reasons, actually, which is part of what makes it funny. Either way, it is a wink. The narrator stepping in to say: you generally know how this goes, let’s move on.

What makes both signals meaningful is what is absent when it matters most. There are no “and so on and so forths” in The Grand Inquisitor chapter, for example. Ivan is precise, controlled, relentless — the phrase is structurally impossible in that section because the material won’t allow shortcuts. Alyosha’s rapture of universal love and forgiveness gets the full treatment too. Dostoevsky clearly knows how to go all the way in when the material demands it. So the casual wave of the hand elsewhere is obviously a choice. He’s Russian. He’ll detail anything to death. But, using authorial judgment, he sets a definite whimsical tone at times.

Being whimsical, the novel collects moments of buffoonery and absurdist humor. Once you start seeing it, it is almost everywhere throughout the novel.

Ivan is in the middle of his devastating litany of children’s suffering — one of the darkest passages in the novel — and pauses, almost tenderly, to say he does not want to burden Alyosha further. Ivan is tormenting himself with these stories and genuinely solicitous. He offers to stop. Alyosha’s response: “Never mind, I want to suffer, too.” Completely sincere. No irony whatsoever. That sincerity in exactly the wrong register is what tips it into dark comedy. It is a macabre deadpan line. Yes, offer me more examples of suffering children, please. Wink.

Fyodor Pavlovich detonates every room he enters. His buffoonery is calculated, weaponized — he knows precisely how outrageous he is being and leans into it. He refuses to behave like a proper character in a serious novel, and the result keeps puncturing any attempt at dignity. It is obviously comic the way Alyosha bounces around like a ping pong ball from place to place. Useful for introducing the characters but ridiculous for Alyosha. He has no control over where he will go next.

Miss Khokhlakova is operatic in her instability — constantly overreacting, contradicting herself, spinning into emotional excess. Exhausting and funny at the same time. The use of hysterics, especially for the female characters (sexist, but this is the 1880s), is often comical. When things get too complex, just start shrieking, that makes things so much better. And then there is the devil visiting Ivan. Not the terrifying metaphysical figure you might expect. A slightly shabby, mildly irritating houseguest in an ill-fitting jacket who talks too much and quotes your own ideas back at you. Cosmic comedy reduced to a social annoyance. He suffers from rheumatism. The devil.

What ties all these together is disproportion. People applying the wrong tone to the wrong situation. Feelings at full volume when a lower register is called for. Ideas half-grasped and run with anyway. The same force that generates passion and drama also generates ridiculousness, because it is the same engine — human intensity pushed past the point of self-regulation.

Chapter VI of Book XI has many comedic elements on display. Katz titles it “A Hymn and a Secret.” This was the translation that made the scene audible to me as comedy. The closer I looked, the funnier it got. Eventually I thought of the old-time comedy duo of Abbott and Costello. I will explain that in a moment.

The title itself sounds elevated, liturgical, almost sacred. Then you open the scene and get a breathless, half-coherent, borderline vaudeville performance about nerves, Bernards, and God getting edged out by chemistry. The gap between the title and the actual texture of the dialogue in this portion of the chapter is its own joke.

Dmitri is in his cell the night before his trial. He is in about the worst possible position a human being can be in — jailed, about to be tried for murdering his own father, tangled in the three thousand rubles he took from his fiancée because he could not stop loving another woman. A life that is, by any measure, one long emotional disaster. Hold all of that while reading what follows.

“God forbid I forget some of my belongings,” he muttered, just to have something to say. “Make sure you don’t forget anyone else’s things either,” Mitya cracked and immediately started laughing at his own witticism. Rakitin blazed up instantly. “You ought to recommend that to your own Karamazovs, a serf-owning brood, and not to Rakitin!” he shouted suddenly, shaking from fury. “What’s wrong? I was joking!” cried Mitya. “What the devil! They’re all like that,” he said, turning to Alyosha, nodding toward Rakitin, who was quickly making his way out. “He was sitting here, laughing and cheerful, and all of a sudden he started seething! He didn’t even nod to you, not at all; have you quarreled with him? Why are you so late? It’s not just that I’ve been waiting for you: I’ve been craving you all morning. Well, it doesn’t matter. We’ll make up for it.” “Why has he begun visiting you so often? Have you made friends with him or what?” asked Alyosha, nodding at the door through which Rakitin had just left. “Made friends with Mikhail? No, not exactly. Why would I have? He’s a swine! He thinks I’m a . . . scoundrel. They also can’t understand jokes — that’s the main thing about them. They’ll never understand them. And their souls are dry, flat and dry; they remind me of the prison walls, just as I was being driven here.” (Katz, pp. 682–683)

He announces his own theme in the first moments of what follows: people like Rakitin (atheist materialists) have no sense of humor — that’s the main thing about them. “Their souls are dry, flat and dry.” Then what immediately follows becomes an extended demonstration of what Dmitri’s version of joking actually looks like. It is messy. It spills into philosophy, insult, science, and self-parody all at once. The people around him can barely register it as humor because it never separates cleanly from everything else.

He opens by cracking a joke that lands wrong with Rakitin, then diagnoses the failure as a deficiency in his audience. Dmitri is not a man who questions his own timing.

“Rakitin knows. Rakitin knows a great deal, devil take him! He won’t become a monk. He plans to go to Petersburg. There, he says, he’ll write criticism, but with a noble tendency. Well, he might be of some use to humanity and establish his own career. Ugh, they’re masters at making careers! Devil take ethics! I’m done for, Aleksey, you man of God! I love you most of all. My heart trembles for you. Who was Karl Bernard?” “Karl Bernard?” Alyosha asked, surprised yet again. “No, not Karl; wait, I got mixed up. Claude Bernard. What is he? Is that chemistry or what?” “He must be some sort of scientist,” replied Alyosha, “but I confess, I can’t say much about him either. I’ve heard only that he’s a scientist, but I can’t say what kind.” “Well, devil take him, I don’t know either,” Mitya swore. “He must be some sort of scoundrel, that’s most likely; they’re all scoundrels. But Rakitin will worm himself into a crack in the wall; he’s also a Bernard. Ah, those Bernards! They breed like rabbits!” (page 683)

Rakitin has become a type — the clever, dry, career-minded explainer of everything. From there Dmitri does what he always does: generalizes wildly. One scientist half-remembered from a conversation becomes a category. A category becomes a swarm. “Those Bernards! They breed like rabbits!” It is a philosophical chain reaction rendered as a rant. The logic is sloppy but directional. He is hunting something real about a cultural shift, just with the precision of a runaway horse.

“He wants to write an article about me, about my case, to initiate his own career in literature; that’s why he keeps coming to see me . . . He wants to argue that ‘I couldn’t help murdering my father; I fell victim to the environment,’ and so on and so forth . . . Just now I said to him, ‘The Karamazovs are not scoundrels: they’re philosophers, because all genuine Russians are philosophers; and although you’ve studied, you’re not a philosopher, you’re a piece of shit.’ He laughed in a malicious way. I said to him: ‘de thoughtibus non est disputandem.’ It’s a clever witticism, isn’t it? At least I’ve also become a classicist,” Mitya said and suddenly burst out laughing. (pp. 683–684)

After mocking Claude Bernard, who was a known scientist from that period, Mitya wants to crown himself intellectually. Out comes the Latin. Mangled, confident, completely unnecessary. He is reaching for “de gustibus non est disputandum” — there is no disputing tastes — and what comes out comic nonsense. Thoughtibus is not even Latin. It’s gibberish. He then congratulates himself for becoming a classicist and bursts out laughing.

Notice the “and so on and so forth” tucked in there. Dostoevsky waves away the ideology in three words. The dismissal is completely consistent with what Mitya is doing verbally — neither of them gives it the full treatment it thinks it deserves. Of course, a totally unexpected “shit” is always good for a laugh but it is also a remarkably crude word choice. So crude and so singular that it is absurdly funny. McDuff also uses that word whereas all other translations reach for different vaguely derogatory word which completely kill the humor of the moment.

A crude word is precisely what is needed here. MacAndrew chooses “low down bastard” while “stinking churl” is what PV comes up with which is sort of grin-able but definitely not as funny. Just for fun I went back to Constance Garnett’s 1912 translation and she renders it simply as “low fellow.” All trace of humor is smoothed out of of the text. No wonder no one understands that Dostoevsky can actually be funny.

The Latin sequence is self-parody without self-awareness. He is doing the same inflated intellectual performance he is mocking in Rakitin. He has become what he is attacking. He has absolutely no idea. He is manic and might bring up any topic at all. Which is clearly with comic intent — after you notice it.

“Why are you ‘done for’? You just said so,” Alyosha interrupted him. “Why? Hmm. In essence . . . if you take it as a whole . . . I feel sorry for God. That’s why.” (page 684)

We cut from Dmitri is “done for” to “I feel sorry for God.” This is a stand-up routine.

Even in the PV translation, I burst out laughing. The book had me smiling up to that point, but this did it. Pity normally flows downward — God toward man, or man toward man. Mitya flips the hierarchy in four words. A man in jail, about to be tried for the murder of his father, feeling sorry for the divine. The line does not build toward anything. It just surfaces, as if his mind stumbled into it while sprinting past.

It is a wonderful example of absurdist humor. Things are so bad for God that even Dmitri feels sorry for Him.

Consider what is actually happening here. Dmitri is arguably in more trouble than anyone else in the novel. Trial tomorrow. Father dead. Fiancée betrayed. Three thousand rubles that were never really his. And his pity does not flow toward himself for a single second. It flows outward — past his own catastrophe entirely — to God. That is both hilarious and, if you think about it, rather magnificent. He is constitutionally incapable of self-pity even when it would be completely warranted. The humor and the nobility are the same gesture.

But why God specifically? Dmitri has just spent the better part of an hour with Rakitin in that cell. Being explained. Having his own murder turned into a career opportunity, a progressive tendency, an article for Petersburg. Listening to someone who knows everything and feels nothing dress up indifference as philosophy. Dmitri finds him an aggravation more than anything else — he’ll let him write the story, fine, start your career, whatever — but the worldview leaves him cold. Dry souls. Flat and dry.

But wait, it gets a lot worse for God. He has to put up with all the Rakitins of the world. Countless numbers of them.. Dmitri knows exactly what that’s like after one afternoon. He looks at the universe and feels a solidarity that is almost tender. Poor God. That’s funny. Not bleakly funny — personally funny. Dmitri doesn’t pity God abstractly. He pities Him the way you’d pity a friend stuck at a bad dinner party with no exit.

Then, true magic happens in the prose...

“What do you mean, you feel sorry for God?” “Just imagine: it’s all there in the nerves, in the head, that is, the nerves in the brain (devil take them!) . . . they have these little tails, the nerves do; well, as soon as they start wiggling, that is, wiggling their little tails, when they start wiggling, an image appears, not immediately, but an instant, a second passes, and then there appears a moment . . . devil take this moment — but an image, that is, an object or an event, well, devil take it — and that’s why I contemplate and then I think . . . because of these little tails, and not at all because I have a soul and am made in the ‘image and likeness,’ and all that nonsense. Mikhail explained all this to me yesterday, and it seared me. It’s magnificent, Alyosha, this science! A new man’s arriving, that much I understand. . . . Still, I feel sorry for God!” “Well, that’s good,” said Alyosha. “That I feel sorry for God? It’s chemistry, brother, chemistry! There’s nothing to be done, Your Reverence; shove over a little, chemistry’s coming!” (page 684)

And then he tries to explain it. Which is where the comedy shifts register entirely.

God is not merely being ignored by the Rakitins of the world. He has been replaced. Not by some grand competing system. By microscopic “wiggling” appendages on neurons. That is the specific indignity. The infinite displaced by the infinitesimal. This is what tips the scene from funny into actually ridiculous.

What makes it work as comedy is that Dmitri is not confused. He is convinced. Completely, sincerely convinced. He has been seared by this information. He delivers it with total authority — restarting, correcting, piling on clauses, “that is… well… not immediately… devil take it…” — the way a man delivers something he knows to be profound. It is cartoon science performed as revelation. Chaplin could do this scene without changing a word (except he was best in silent movies lol). The comedy is generated entirely by the gap between the size of the gesture and the size of the claim being made by it.

I keep seeing Dimitri pinching the air — index finger to thumb — showing Alyosha the precise size of these little wiggling tails. Giving a lecture. Both of them transfixed by the gesture. Dostoevsky does not write it that way. But that is the vibe it seemed to have for me in Katz this time. Maybe his fingers trying to imitate the wiggling, both of them taking it seriously for a moment. Classic comedy is on a roll.

“Shove over a little, chemistry’s coming!” You can picture him literally nudging God down the bench. He is holding both positions simultaneously — admiration for the science, pity for God — and sees absolutely no contradiction. The new worldview does not resolve anything. It just sits next to the old feeling, perfectly comfortable.

“Rakitin doesn’t like God, no, he doesn’t! That’s the sore spot with all of them! But they hide it. They lie. They pretend. ‘Will you expound these ideas in the department of criticism?’ I ask. ‘Well, clearly they won’t let me do it,’ he says, laughing. ‘Then what will become of man,’ I ask. ‘Without God and an afterlife? Therefore, everything will be permitted now, and one can do anything?’ ‘Didn’t you know?’ he asks, with a laugh. ‘A clever man’ he says, ‘is permitted to do anything; a clever man even knows how to catch crayfish, but you,’ he says, ‘have killed someone and now you’re rotting away in prison!’ He says that to me. He’s a real swine! I used to kick that sort of person out, but now I listen to them. He says a lot that makes sense.” (pp. 684–685)

One of the central ideas of the novel drops right there, in the middle of what feels like a comic rant. “Everything will be permitted now, and one can do anything?” This is a steady beat throughout the novel. It appears in all sorts of circumstances. Here, Dmitri is reconstructing the conversation in both voices — his own questions urgent, almost pleading; Rakitin’s world is smug and clipped. A one-man reenactment.

Then he calls Rakitin a swine and immediately admits he says a lot that makes sense. Hatred and admiration in consecutive sentences. He cannot hold a consistent position for more than a breath. It is best to read Dmitri, especially here, as having a stream of consciousness experience out loud. He is extrovertedly extravagant.

“He also writes well. A week ago he began reading an article to me. I copied down three lines of it on purpose; wait a second — here it is.” Mitya hastened to remove a piece of paper from his vest pocket and began reading aloud: “‘In order to resolve this question, it is necessary first of all to place one’s personality in contradiction to one’s own reality.’ Do you understand that or not?” “No, I don’t,” replied Alyosha. He looked at Mitya and listened to him with interest. “I don’t understand either. It’s obscure and unclear; on the other hand, it’s clever. ‘Everyone,’ he says, ‘writes like that now, because of the environment.’ They’re afraid of the environment. He also writes poetry, the scoundrel. He wrote in praise of Khokhlakova’s little foot, ha, ha, ha!” (page 685)

My grandfather loved Abbott and Costello. He never tired of their famous comedy baseball routine “Who’s on First?” — you could catch it on television fairly regularly in the 1960s, and he always laughed at the same beats. I randomly thought of him reading this exchange.

Because structurally, this is “Who’s on First.” One person trying to follow. The other talking faster than meaning can stabilize. Terms shifting, confidence high, clarity dropping. Mitya rummages in his vest pocket — you can feel the anticipation, the sense that something important is about to land. He reads aloud. It is complete nonsense. Alyosha, perfect straight man, says simply: “No, I don’t.”

That is Abbott. Clean, simple, honest. No ornament.

Mitya’s response is peak Costello: “I don’t understand either. It’s obscure and unclear; on the other hand, it’s clever.” He collapses the entire intellectual performance in one sentence and still refuses to give it up. He acknowledges the nonsense and bows to it simultaneously. Then he tags it with Rakitin writes poetry. In praise of Khokhlakova’s little foot. Ha, ha, ha.

After all that — the philosophy, the Latin, the neuroscience, the existential stakes — we end on a foot.

The Brothers Karamazov features extraordinary — absolutely extraordinary — writing matched by very few authors in any language. Few writers can take you inside the minds of their main characters like Dostoevsky. And he will shake you to your core. The suffering is real, the philosophy is serious, the theology is argued with full force.

But Dostoevsky refuses to pick a lane. He stacks it all in the same moment and lets an energized character like Dmitri run through it like a storm. The humor does not undercut the weight. It is produced by the same pressure. Push human intensity far enough and it has to spill into something ridiculous. That is not a failure of tone. It is just what people actually do.

It took me four readings to hear it. Three tours through in MacAndrew and I saw almost no comedy at all. Then the ha-ha-ha’s finally started registering. The “and so on and so forths” started signaling. The texture that had been invisible became visible, and once visible, impossible to unsee. It gave the entire work a new breath of life.

The novel did not become less serious. It became more human.

And in what we just covered, Dmitri is joking. He announced it himself from the very beginning. Read this section like “Who’s on First?” and you’ll have the proper animation for what I’ve quoted here. Admittedly this is asking a lot. Most people are not this way anymore, so it takes a bit of effort to read hundreds of pages and understand the funny parts. Just as it does to understand the humor throughout Shakespeare’s plays, comedies and tragedies both. I’m sure Dostoevsky was well acquainted with the humorous side of King Lear.

It was a joy to discover how much humor there is in this great novel and to see the character of Dmitri particularly shown in a new light. The novel sits at number two on my all-time top list with only Proust ahead of it. In terms of my life, I spent several decades in Dostoevsky before I ever knew Proust. So it is special in that regard too. A lifelong friend I am only now coming to know.