[Philip Roth is credited with bringing Kundera's works to the attention of the English-speaking public. The essay from which this excerpt is taken was originally published as the introduction to Kundera's Laughable Loves, 1974.]

I would think that … [Milan Kundera] would prefer to find a readership in the West that was not drawn to his fiction because he is a writer who is oppressed by a Communist regime, especially since Kundera's political novel. The Joke, happens to represent only an aspect of his wide-ranging intelligence and talent. (pp. 203-04)

But having written The Joke, Kundera, for all his wide-ranging interests, now finds himself an enemy of the state and nothing more—ironically enough, in a position very much like the protagonist of The Joke, whose error it is as a young Communist student to send a teasing postcard to his girl friend, making fun of her naïve political earnestness. (p. 204)

Well, in Eastern Europe a man should be more careful of the letters he writes, even to his girl friend. For his three joking sentences, Jahn is found guilty by a student tribunal of being an enemy of the state, is expelled from the university and the Party, and is consigned to an army penal corps where for seven years he works in the coal mines. "But, Comrades," says Jahn, "it was only a joke." Nonetheless, he is swallowed up by a state somewhat lacking a sense of humor about itself, and subsequently, having misplaced his own sense of humor somewhere in the mines, he is swallowed up and further humiliated by his plans for revenge.

The Joke is, of course, not so benign in intent as Jahn's postcard. I would suppose that Kundera must himself have known, somewhere along the line, that one day the authorities might confirm the imaginative truthfulness of his book by bringing their own dogmatic seriousness down upon him for writing as he did about the plight of Ludvík Jahn. "Socialist realism," after all, is the approved artistic mode in his country, and as one Prague critic informed me when I asked for a definition, "Socialist realism consists of writing in praise of the government and the party so that even they understand it." Oddly (just another joke, really) Kundera's book conforms more to Stalin's own prescription for art: "socialist content in national form." Since two of the most esteemed books written in the nation in question happen to be The Trial by Franz Kafka and The Good Soldier Schweik by Jaroslav Hašek, Kundera's own novel about a loyal citizen upon whom a terrible joke is played by the powers that be would seem to be entirely in keeping with the spirit of Stalin's injunction. If only Stalin were alive so that Kundera could point out to him this continuity in "national form" and historical preoccupation. (pp. 204-05)

Erotic play and power are the subjects frequently at the center of the stories that Kundera calls, collectively, Laughable Loves. Sexuality as a weapon (in this case, the weapon of he who is otherwise wholly assailable) is to the point of The Joke as well: to revenge himself upon the political friend who had turned upon him back in his remote student days, Ludvík Jahn, released from the coal mines at last, coldly conceives a plan to seduce the man's wife. In this decision by Kundera's hero to put his virility in the service of his rage, he displays a kinship to characters in the fiction of Mailer and Mishima…. However, what distinguishes Kundera's cocksman from Mailer's or Mishima's is the ease with which his erotic power play is thwarted, and turns into yet another joke at his expense. He is so much more vulnerable in good part because he has been so crippled by ostracism from the Party and imprisonment in the penal corps …, but also because Kundera, unlike Mailer or Mishima, seems even in a book as bleak and cheerless as The Joke to be fundamentally amused by the uses to which a man will think to put his sexual member, or the uses to which his member will put him. This amusement, mixed though it is with sympathy and sorrow, leads Kundera away from anything even faintly resembling a mystical belief or ideological investment in the power of potency or orgasm.

In Laughable Loves, what I've called Kundera's "amusement" with erotic enterprises and lustful strategies emerges as the mild satire of a story like "The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire," wherein Don Juanism is viewed as a sport played by a man against a team of women, oftentimes without body contact—or, in the wry, rather worldly irony of the Dr. Havel stories, "Symposium" and "Dr. Havel After Ten Years," where Don Juanism is depicted as a way of life in which women of all social stations eagerly and willingly participate as "sexual objects," particularly so with Havel, eminent physician and aging Casanova, who in his prime is matter-of-factly told by a professional colleague: "… you're like death, you take everything." Or Kundera's amusement emerges as a kind of detached Chekhovian tenderness in the story about a balding, thirtyish, would-have-been eroticist, who sets about to seduce an aging woman whose body he expects to find repellent, a seduction undertaken to revenge himself upon his own stubborn phallic daydreams…. [This story], "Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead," seems to me "Chekhovian" not merely because of its tone, or its concern with the painful and touching consequences of time passing and old selves dying, but because it is so very good.

In "The Hitchhiking Game," "Nobody Will Laugh," and "Edward and God," Kundera turns to those jokes he is so fond on contemplating, the ones that begin in whimsical perversity, and end in trouble…. What is so often laughable, in the stories of Kundera's Czechoslovakia, is how grimly serious just about everything turns out to be, jokes, games, and pleasure included; what's laughable is how terribly little there is to laugh at with any joy.

My own favorite story is "Edward and God." Like The Joke, it deals with a young Czech whose playfulness (with women, of course) and highly developed taste for cynicism and blasphemy expose him to the harsh judgments of a dogmatic society or, rather, expose him to those authorities who righteously promulgate and protect the dogmas, but do so stupidly and without even genuine conviction or understanding…. [Where] there is something of an aggrieved tone and polemical intent in The Joke—a sense communicated, at least to a Westerner, that the novel is also a statement made in behalf of an abused nation, and in defiance of a heartless regime—"Edward and God" is more like a rumination, in anecdotal form, upon a social predicament that rouses the author to comic analysis and philosophical speculation, even to farce, rather than to angry exposé. (pp. 205-09)

"Edward and God" does not derive from manifesto or protest literature, but connects in spirit as well as form to those humorous stories one hears by the hundreds in Prague these days, stories such as a powerless or oppressed people are often adept at telling about themselves, and in which they seem to take an aesthetic pleasure—what pleasure is there otherwise?—from the very absurdities and paradoxes that characterize their hardship and cause them pain. (p. 209)