"Martin Heidegger was recorded to have laughed only once.... It happened at a picnic in the Harz Mountains with Ernst Jünger, who 'leaned over...'"

"... to pick up a sauerkraut and sausage roll, and his lederhosen split with a tremendous crack.' Like Heidegger, Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was not known for his lightness of spirit.... In the spirit of [that] anecdote about Heidegger, I’ve often recalled that, in his diaries, Kafka reports sitting in a bar in Prague with his friend Max Brod after they’d left an opera. Brod accidentally sprayed soda water all over Kafka, who laughed so hard that seltzer and grenadine shot out of his nose."

Writes Dwight Garner in "The Kafka You Never Knew/An unabridged volume of Franz Kafka’s diaries restores the rough edges and impulses that were buffed out of past editions" (NYT).

If that — or anything else — makes you want to read Kafka's diaries, here's the new edition (at Amazon). I bought it.

Is there a category of intellect that only gets humor in slapstick form? Is their world so dark because they're waiting to see 3-Stooges-level high jinks in real life? 

Anyway, what's new about this new edition of Kafka's diaries? Earlier editions were edited by the accidental soda water sprayer Brod, who took out prostitutes and hints of homosexuality. 

Where Brod strove to clean Kafka up and foster a sense that he was, in [the words of the new translator Ross Benjamin], a “saintly, prophetic genius, whose purity places him at an elevated remove from the world,” this edition scuffs him up and returns him to earth, in an intimate manner that does no injury to our sense of his suffering, or his profound and original gifts.

These diaries are choppy; Benjamin compares them to studio outtakes. They often read like poetry.

Fine. I prefer that. The choppy, broken-up quality is a plus. Does it "read like poetry"? To me, it sounds most like blogging. My favorite form. Maybe I should only read diaries!

Kafka spent so many nights at the theater (he admired the way Goethe kept supplies of wine and cold food in his box)....

You never want to sit too close to Goethe.

Tragedy and forms of comedy don’t just coexist in these diaries but feed each other. He was not, at every moment, unhappy about being unhappy.

Yes, I do want to acknowledge that Kafka does not belong in that category of intellect that only gets humor in slapstick form. Perhaps there's a category of a intellect that only gets humor either as crude slapstick or complexly interwoven with tragedy. Nothing in between.