The ancient thinker Democritus, a contemporary of Plato, was known as “the laughing philosopher.” He got this title because of his boisterous contempt for human foolishness, which he often gave vent to in the agora itself with loud and shameless guffaws. The Cynic Diogenes indulged in the same disconcerting habit.There haven’t been many laughs in philosophy since the fifth century B.C. A few philosophers – Socrates, Machiavelli, Kierkegaard – have displayed a mordant and sometimes playful sense of humor, but most of them are a pretty grim lot. Contemporary thinkers are no exception. A volume entitled “The Humor of Heidegger” would consist of little more than staples and binding paste.

Sometimes, however, as if despite himself, a philosopher produces a masterpiece of inadvertent comedy. Such works are all too rare. For its sheer, delicious bloat of absurdity I’d have to nominate Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” as the funniest philosophical tract ever penned. As a teenager, I admit, I found the work enthralling and often stunned my elders by declaiming such Nietzschean pronouncements as “It is no simple art to sleep: it is necessary after all to stay awake the whole day before.” Now I find that such pearls of inanity produce nothing but hilarity in me. I won’t dignify my reaction by calling it a Democritean snort. It’s more like the irresistible amusement slapstick inspires. And the humor is in inverse proportion to the stifling solemnity of Nietzsche’s half-baked rhapsodies.

“Zarathustra,”though it brims with parody (not all of it conscious), has little of the caustic irony of Nietzsche’s genuine masterpieces, such as “Untimely Meditations” or “Beyond Good and Evil.” As we know from his own account, the book came to him in sudden bursts of inspiration, beginning in 1883, alternately in the Italian coastal town of Rapallo and in the Swiss Engadin; the first three parts took only 10 days each to write, and it shows. No wonder Kant stuck close to Konigsberg and Spinoza hunkered down in Amsterdam. Ligurian fishing villages or high peaks where the oxygen is scarce probably aren’t ideal settings for disciplined cogitation.

For all its silliness, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” has proved enormously influential since it first appeared in 1885. Nietzsche declared it his favorite among his works and even claimed, with a straight face, that it was “the profoundest book” of world literature. Modesty was not his most conspicuous virtue. I’ve been re-reading the excellent new translation by Graham Parkes (Oxford World’s Classics, 335 pages, $14.95), who also includes a fine – if overly serious – introduction, a useful bibliography, and meticulous notes. In his sensitivity to Nietzsche’s style, with all its bizarre lurches, Mr. Parkes has captured the essence of the original better than any of his predecessors. (It’s no fault of his if his publishers have adorned the cover with a garish, New-Age painting, “Zarathustra by the Sea,” by Setsuko Aihara, which is so throbbingly lurid that I half expected batteries to be included.)

Born in Saxony in 1844, Nietzsche began his career as an unusually brilliant classical philologist; he was only 25 when he was appointed “Extraordinary Professor” at the University of Basel. A few years later, in 1872, he published “The Birth of Tragedy,” one of his finest and most original works. A passionate lover of music, and sometime composer, Nietzsche had by this time been close to Richard Wagner for several years; the relationship, which both shaped and wounded him, was the most decisive of his life. “Zarathustra,” begun after his break with Wagner, could be read as an audacious attempt to do with words what the composer had done with notes. The work is nothing if not operatic.

When we first encounter Zarathustra, he has just spent a decade in seclusion. At dawn he favors the rising sun with the following soliloquy: “Greetings, Great Star! What would your happiness be, were it not for those whom you illumine!” The sun fails to reply – but then, it doesn’t get a chance. Zarathustra is on a roll and continues, “Behold! I am overburdened with my wisdom, like the bee that has gathered too much honey.” Our prophet has resolved “to become human again” and like the sun itself, to “go under.” The narrator intones, “Thus began Zarathustra’s going-under.” You can practically hear the orchestra swell towards a fruity chord but for the book, as well as its gabby protagonist, it’s all downhill from here.

“Zarathustra” isn’t just windy oratory; our prophet,a magus in Lederhosen, offers specific practical advice. For example,”Ten times a day must you laugh and be cheerful: else your stomach will disturb you during the night,that father of sorrow.” This could explain my nocturnal dyspepsia, but why 10 times? Wouldn’t 15 be better? Only the prophet knows! And he can be practical: “To some people you may give not your hand, but only a slap with a paw: and I would that your paw might also have claws.” Amen to that, I say!

Amid the rant, there are, of course, striking remarks. While railing against pity – a favorite Nietzschean bugbear – Zarathustra exclaims, on the authority of the devil, “God too has his Hell: it is his love for human beings.”The notorious proclamation that “God is dead” follows and blunts the effect; surely this is a rallying cry whose useful life ended decades ago? More often, the prophet treats us to gnomic statements as perplexing as they are ponderous, like “My blunt mouth – is of the people: too coarsely and heartily I talk for silky rabbits. And even stranger do my words sound to all ink-fishes and quill-foxes.” Come again?

Aside from the “death of God,” the big idea in “Zarathustra” is that of “eternal recurrence.” Nietzsche thought it powerfully “life-affirming” and explained it thus:

What if, one day or night,a daemon were to slide up after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live and have lived it, you will have to live again and innumerable times over; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every pleasure and every thought and sigh and all the unspeakably small and large things in your life must come back to you, and all in the same order and sequence’ … would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who talked this way? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment in which you would answer him, ‘You are a God and never have I heard anything more divine!’

The moral thrust of Nietzsche’s horrible hypothesis is, of course, that we would live our lives differently if we knew that we would have to repeat them, in minute and excruciating detail,over countless eons yet to come. I’m firmly against this notion. Call me a silky bunny, but the prospect of an eternal rereading of “Zarathustra” is a thought worse than death.

eormsby@nysun.com