Humor, Hilarity, Hypocrisy and Irony: The Purpose of Comedy in Patrick Süskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer Eli Curran-Moore 12th Grade

Author and historian Barbara Tuchman said “Satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.” In the German macabre novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer where, for author Patrick Suskind, The Third Reich, ''was for my generation always in the back of our minds.”(2) and in a novel full of references to German stories like The Name of the Rose and Faust where misbehavior is often deadly, it might appear, depending on the reader, easy or very difficult for humor to find a foothold. Suskind's “...relentless irony - a tone of barely suppressed hilarity that permeates ''Perfume'' (2) seems atypical of the ‘precision German engineering’ culture. So who was Perfume intended for? Perfume had a wide reception, but was it made to be entertaining, or did Suskind intend to have it closely analyzed by expert German literary critics, or both? Answers of the novel’s themes range from “an indictment of Enlightenment rationality, an allegory of the fascist mind, or simply as a cynical postmodern pastiche that serves the reader titillating but derivative kitsch.” (2) As for comedy, upon closer examination the masterful so called layers of double coding of humor woven through the text are revealed. Humor, in the form of satire,...