French poet and playwright Alfred Jarry is best known for his three Ubu plays—most notoriously Ubu Roi, which caused a riot upon its first performance in 1896. Depending on who you believe, the uproar was caused either by the play’s first word, merdre (which could be translated as “shittrr,” or “shite,” or “crrap”... you get the idea) or by its radical departure from theatrical norms—actors, for instance, were required to affect the jerky movements of marionettes. Either way, the pandemonium made Jarry famous across France. For lyrical poet W. B. Yeats, who was in the audience, the play signaled the end of an era: “After all our subtle colour and nervous rhythm… what more is possible? After us the Savage God.”

Although we should be careful of conflating Jarry with Ubu’s monstrous king, his own behavior was colourful to say the least. He reportedly shot at a fellow dinner guest with his beloved Bull Dog revolver (later owned by Picasso, an admirer) and, towards the end of his life, is said to have regularly consumed two liters of wine and three absinthes before midday. But his friends and acquaintances, among them Paul Gauguin and Oscar Wilde, did not regard Jarry as a mere clown. Although he died at just 34, Jarry gave us a lot more than Ubu. He was a journalist, novelist, and pioneer of book design. He also invented ‘pataphysics.

Though ‘pataphysics can be seen as a philosophical prank, it’s hard to knock a concept widely acknowledged to have paved the way for Dada, Futurism, Surrealism, and the Theatre of the Absurd.

Concerned with contradiction rather than rational logic, ‘pataphysics is an inherently slippery subject, and any attempt at explanation runs the risk of taking a joke too seriously. “‘Pataphysics will examine the laws which govern exceptions,” declared Jarry, who also defined it as the “science of imaginary solutions,” describing “a universe which can be—and perhaps should be—envisaged in the place of the traditional one.” While there was an element of science in this abstract philosophy, Jarry himself described ‘pataphysics as extending as far beyond metaphysics, as metaphysics extended beyond physics.

That might sound clear as mud, and certainly ‘pataphysics can be seen as a spoof, a prank: a mischievous celebration of the paradox that hardly deserves serious consideration. At the same time, Jarry’s pseudoscience appealed to everyone from the Marx Brothers to Marcel Duchamp, with Baudrillard, Beckett, Borges, and Ballard among the many others in Jarry’s debt. It’s hard to knock a concept widely acknowledged to have paved the way for Dada, Futurism, Surrealism, and the Theatre of the Absurd. In such a context, the charge of taking a joke too seriously becomes in itself faintly absurd.

‘Pataphysics has also been an important influence on music, or at least on specific musicians in a number of genres. Cleveland art punks Pere Ubu took their name from Jarry's most famous character while, in 1989, industrial pioneers Nurse With Wound released an album entitled Nurses With Wound Present the Sisters of Pataphysics. Among composers, devotees include Gavin Bryars and John White, both of whom released records on Brian Eno’s wonderful Obscure label in the 1970s. Seventies psych rockers Hawkwind and experimental hip-hop producer DJ Spooky are among the disparate others to have been inspired by ‘pataphysics. It was even referenced on “Maxwell's Silver Hammer”, from the Beatles’ Abbey Road, after Paul McCartney heard a version of Jarry’s Ubu Cocu on the BBC.

As far as I know, however, only one band has been officially recognized by the Collège de ‘Pataphysique—founded in Paris in 1948, long after Jarry’s death—and that band is Soft Machine. Robert Wyatt, who emerged in 1966 as the group’s drummer and singer before forming the band Matching Mole and then forging a solo career of rarely paralleled credibility and consistency, had the spiral ‘pataphysics logo painted on his bass drum, and still has a copy of Jarry's writing on his bookshelf today.

“Jarry is funny, and I like so much of the visual art his freedom from logic inspired,” explains Wyatt. “Alfie [Wyatt’s wife and creative partner] passed on to me an unattributed saying: either see it as part of the dance or as if there's a great weight on you. So Surrealism celebrates freedom from rationally perceived reality and describes an aspect of ideas that have long been accepted: the dream worlds of religious art, for example, and fairy tales. But to me, in practice, the simplest and least pretentious access to the celebration of the fanciful is the joke: life as part of the dance.”

Wyatt was introduced to ‘pataphysics in 1967, when Soft Machine—already established, alongside Pink Floyd, as darlings of the London underground scene, and about to tour the States with the Jimi Hendrix Experience—performed a live soundtrack to Ubu Enchaîné at the Edinburgh Festival. By the time of their second album, Wyatt was introducing the band as “the official orchestra of the College of ‘Pataphysics,” going on to prove these credentials by singing the letters of the alphabet in reverse. This was a clear echo of Jarry himself, who had advocated the backwards meal, commencing with brandy and ending with soup.

Always interested in modernism, it is no surprise that Wyatt felt a broad affinity with the Frenchman, whose Ubu Roi had arguably kicked off the whole movement. In particular, Wyatt shares his interest in the ambiguity of language and his emphasis on childhood memory: the grotesque character of Ubu was modeled on Jarry’s unpopular physics teacher, Monsieur Hébert. Jarry’s habit of turning up to the opera wearing a paper shirt adorned with painted black tie also predates Wyatt’s trademark stage outfit—a jacket drawn onto his naked torso in crayon—by over half a century.

Robert Wyatt

So far so funny, but Jarry had a darker side too. The composer and academic Andrew Hugill talks of the “deeply serious humour” of ‘pataphysics, while playwright and translator Kenneth McLeish has referred to ‘pataphysics as “taking seriously the business of taking nothing seriously at all.” This clearly chimes with Wyatt. “I have long thought that funny reaches places to which serious has no direct access,” he explains. “Tragedy has inevitability, but comedy can go anywhere, so I don't find comedy less valuable than tragedy.”

Jarry’s brutal, irreverent humor, at once bleak and celebratory, continues to influence Wyatt’s thinking today: He is quick to laugh and even once described himself as a “sit-down comedian.” (Wyatt has been paraplegic since falling from a fourth-story window in 1973.) Yet it’s not hard to see his humor as the tears-of-a-clown flipside of a generally bleak outlook, from which life is nothing more than a cosmic joke.

“I do think life is grim,” he nods. “You know that saying: The devil is in the detail? I think the devil runs the show, and God is in the detail. The show itself is devilish but, out of that, little beautiful moments can be plucked with luck and skill.”

In terms of his music, the influence of what Wyatt refers to in emails as “Patafizzix” is perhaps most obvious in “Signed Curtain”, a meta-ballad he recorded shortly after leaving Soft Machine. “This is the first verse, this is the first verse,” it begins, and continues in similarly self-referential fashion: “this is the chorus or perhaps it’s the bridge…” And when Wyatt sang on a song for composer John Greaves’ 1996 album Songs, he finally got his chance to deliver the line: “Peel’s foe, not a set animal, laminates a tone of sleep.” It is, surely, the longest grammatically correct palindrome in popular music—and it could have come straight from Jarry’s pen.

‘Pataphysics can also be used to explain, or at least to interpret, Wyatt’s political decisions. Denounced as a Stalinist after he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1979, he came back with the Stalin-praising “Stalin Wasn’t Stallin’”. But crucially, the track had originally been released by an American group, the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet, during the Second World War. It was an uncomfortable reminder for the fiercely anti-Communist leaders of both Britain and the U.S. that, just a couple of decades earlier, the former figurehead of what Reagan called “the evil empire” had been good ol’ Uncle Joe, the West’s ally against Hitler. As well as demonstrating precisely the mischievous sense of humor that so-called Tankies were supposed to lack, this was also an example of the ‘pataphysical concept of clinamen: the slight swerve that creates an entirely new meaning.

Wyatt is no longer a member of the Communist Party but he does still regard Marxism as the most useful lens through which to see the world. Fittingly for a man who has described Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as one of the greatest political satires ever written, he does not see Marxism and ‘pataphysics as mutually exclusive. In fact, they are closely linked, even if politics is dominant: He is, he says, a ‘Pataphysical Marxist rather than a Marxist ‘Pataphysician.

“‘Pataphysics came first,” he explains. “It found me. I did not look for it. But then, a decade later, the politics, too, arrived uninvited. I gradually realized that the world is at war, and we were all implicated. This put me in the same position as any artist in wartime. Do I ignore it, like Matisse, or participate, like Picasso? I accept that both reactions can be seen as, well, acceptable. Matisse and Picasso loved each other, after all.”

“If it were just professional politicians who were bullies and cowards,” he goes on, “these things could be fought out in the open, democratically. And indeed, in domestic politics, they often are. But the collusion of the mainstream media, mostly controlled by unaccountable vested interest groups, leads to an appallingly blinkered consensus regarding foreign affairs, which I cannot bring myself to ignore. In fact, I'd say ‘pataphysics, Dada, and the Theatre of the Absurd prepared me fairly well for considering a wide range of alternative possibilities—not just in art but, by extension, in the world of human communities as well.”

So perhaps ‘pataphysics, Jarry’s semi-spoof philosophy, remains pertinent over a century after its conception. Or is the whole thing just a joke long past its sell-by date? What does Wyatt say to those who think Jarry was simply having us on?

“‘Pataphysics offers a way of looking at things in another way,” he replies. “If it doesn't suit you, no harm done. That's the deal with artists, ain’t it? In his case, the subject is scientific enquiry, but that doesn't mean it's ‘science,’ which is the search for irrefutable evidence. So in a sense, ‘pataphysics is a deliberate oxymoron. Religion is often based on oxymorons: life after death, virgin birth, and so on. In fact you could almost say ‘pataphysics is one of the few such oxymoronic mind-exercises that does not seriously claim to be ‘the truth.’ So the question might as well be, ‘Are theists just having us on?”’

Marcus O’Dair is the author of Different Every Time: The Authorised Biography of Robert Wyatt, which will be published by Serpent’s Tail on October 30. O’Dair is also appearing in conversation with Wyatt at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London on November 23, as part of the London Jazz Festival.