Wythe Marschall… tells a fable about a legendary kangaroo king. The king presided over a fairy-tale court wherein only anecdotal evidence was permitted. One day the king fell ill (a grasshopper jumped into his pouch), but before he died (official cause: confluxication of the rhinomphalos) he told a parable about a king and a grasshopper. We, his subjects, couldn’t parse the king’s allegory until a dolphin named Jacques Derrida pointed out that we were trapped in the fable I’m telling. Then everybody had lemonade and Mexican beer.

***

Some people think postmodern philosophy is depressing. Well this pun—a Derrida snippet, on a Derrida conference, about being the guy the conference is all about, about feeling dead while still alive—proves them all wrong:

If I am applied Derrida, how can I bear being here? It’s unbearable. To be dead without being dead: unburyable.

(Emphasis added.)

J. D. was always punnin’.