Jaroslav Hašekthe ArenaENTP

In the spring of 1911, at 28, Jaroslav Hašek ran for the Austrian Imperial parliament from a tavern in Vinohrady, in Prague. He was too young to take the seat even if he won. That was part of the joke.

His party was called the Party of Moderate Progress within the Bounds of the Law. Say it aloud and the joke is half told. Real parties promised greatness. Hašek's promised progress, but moderate, and only if permitted.

By one friend's account, it began as a favor. A landlord whose pub no party wanted watched the thirsty voters cross the street every evening to a rival's meeting hall. So Hašek's friends set up a party of their own to fill his tables.

The joke worked because nobody cracked a smile. There was an executive committee. Meetings opened with party hymns. Posters urged voters to cast their ballots as one man for the writer Mr Jaroslav Hašek. Crowds came.

And Hašek spoke, for hours, without notes. With mock fury he attacked the fee caretakers charged to open the front door at night, and demanded that caretakers be nationalized. The party even called for slavery to be brought back. Everyone in the room knew it was satire, aimed at the solemn, impossible promises being made across the street.

It is a move Arenas know well. Step inside a serious institution, play it perfectly straight, and let the seriousness become the joke. He had done it before. In 1909, as editor of a magazine called Animal World, he filled its pages partly with animals he had made up. He did not keep the job.

Prague voted on 13 June 1911. Nobody knows exactly how many votes Hašek won. By one memoir, only his closest friends voted for him. The crowds had laughed for hours, then gone to the polls and chosen someone else.

The room that laughs with an Arena is not always the room that stands with them. The same year, his young marriage fell apart. He lived where the laughter was, in taverns and cabarets, with anyone who would stay up.

The war took him to Russia, where, given a cause and a structure, he served the Red Army as a capable officer. He came home to Prague at the end of 1920, went back to the taverns, and in 1921 began the novel that made him famous.

The great man turns out to be Švejk, a cheerful dog-seller who obeys every order so completely that the whole army looks ridiculous. It is the tavern campaign again: a solemn phrase, a straight face, and an institution made to laugh at itself.

In August 1921 he moved to the village of Lipnice. His body was failing. His legs swelled. When he could no longer write, he lay on a bed by the window and dictated Švejk aloud, chapter after chapter. He had always been best out loud, and his last book became one more performance.

He died at Lipnice on 3 January 1923, aged 39, with the novel unfinished. A friend later remembered leaving him after one late night, sure he would see him many more times. He didn't.