Ubu Roi: A Patareading

Text by professor Timo Airaksinen

Abstract: In Alfred Jarry's play Ubu Roi (1986), Papa Ubu is a ruthless usurper whose fetishistic obsession with money drives him to commit numerous crimes. The play satirizes greed and violence, presenting caricatured characters and absurd weapons. Despite his initial success, Ubu's defeat reflects cosmic justice. The play stands out for its dark humor and explores communication through chaotic, exaggerated language—Jarry's key Pata-aesthetic contribution. The social world is sane and decent, unlike Papa Ubu's language, which represents an absurdist element in the play. The plot is otherwise quite conventional.

Keywords: fetishes, money, weapons, violence, justice, foul language, humor, irony, vice, shit

1. Introduction: Money and Fetishism

Alfred Jarry's play Ubu Roi (1896) is an early classic of absurdist puppet theatre. Jarry tells a prima facie meaningful story that introduces a storyline, some comprehensible characters, and a moral message. Also, its sarcastic verbosity indeed approaches surrealism, but for that, it contains too much conventional social criticism. I read the play as an exercise in Pataesthetics, which touches on Jarry's Pataphysics and Pataphilosophy. Papa Ubu is a placeholder in a psychological frame that does not recognize the standard Freudian organization of the Ego and the Id, to say nothing of the Superego. Ubu Roi introduces a main character whose life and language are driven not by the Ego but by the Id, a primal subconscious element. As a King, he is a fully uninhibited expression of pure evil and absurdist Pata. As a paradigm of the elemental forces of greed and violence, he recognizes no constraints. Ubu, the man, is a human monster par excellence—a usurper and tyrant—who was the King of Aragon and is now the King of Poland. He has his wife, Mama Ubu, who is his evil Doppelgänger —an echo that reflects his thought waves back to him in a distorted form, even before he becomes conscious of them. Mama Ubu represents the Devil in him, but also, paradoxically, his occasional moral Superego as a deus ex machina. Ubu is, paradigmatically, a greedy, cruel, vain, lazy, cowardly, and eternally confused mind who needs Mama's clear-headed, if simple-minded and erratic, motivational contributions. At the same time, he fights back ferociously, when needed, his verbalizations are fantastic, and his imagination is fertile. He is all evil, not the least good or virtuous, possessing all the imaginable vices.

Jarry's satirical approach deliberately blurs the lines between the grotesque and the philosophical, using absurd exaggeration to critique both societal structures and individual psychology. The play's language, filled with neologisms and vulgarity, is not merely for its shock value—it dismantles the façade of civility. It exposes the primal motivations that drive both Ubu and his wife. This subversive humor, combined with their relentless pursuit of wealth and power, makes Ubu Roi a biting commentary on the absurdities of human nature and the corrupting influence of unchecked desire.

Aristotle's virtue ethics recognizes the following levels of human life and ethical concerns:

A virtuous person recognizes no motive to do wrong.

A strong-willed person struggles successfully against what they know is wrong.

A weak-willed, akratic person struggles unsuccessfully against what they know is wrong.

An evil person does wrong knowing it is wrong, or perhaps because it is wrong.

An animalistic and barbaric agent does wrong, not knowing what wrongness means.

According to Plato, the categories of evil and akratic persons are impossible, but Aristotle recognizes both. According to Plato's Socrates, virtue is knowledge, and therefore, one cannot act wrongly, knowing it is wrong. Wrongdoing logically entails a lack of moral knowledge. Papa Ubu certainly knows what he is doing. He and Mama do not quite exemplify the final and ultimate, animalistic and barbaric category of evil—they know too much, and therefore they are evil people.

The Marquis de Sade is an example of a person and author whose Id dominated the Ego and certainly bypassed his Superego. Sade wrote about how to enjoy evil things, and he also acted out some of his nasty imaginary ideas. He belonged to the second-to-last category. His libertine heroes recognize the distinction between good and evil, but they choose the latter because they find it more stimulating than the former. Crime constitutes their pleasure simply because it is wrong. This choice embodies their fundamental freedom and libertine mindset. Sade's heroes are evil, whereas Papa Ubu may look animalistic in his unreflective motivation, but he initially displays flashes of budding moral self-consciousness, which makes him an evil person. Moreover, Papa Ubu is not a hedonist like Sade; his focus is on money as a personal fetish like the ever-elusive blue bird of happiness. However, we are interested in Pataphysics and Patapsyhology, and therefore, we must keep in mind that Pata is as far from psychological science as that is from common-sense ideas of human life and its moral understanding—Sigmund Freud, for instance, when he introduced his revolutionary ideas, was close to Pata and far from common sense and contemporary psychology. An AI summary (www.ubu roi marx commodity fetishism) says the following:

Alfred Jarry's play Ubu Roi is an absurdist work that applies Marx's concept of commodity fetishism and can be interpreted through its lens by examining how it presents characters and society as obsessed with and distorted by abstract forces like power and wealth, rather than by concrete human relationships or actual value derived from labor. (I have modified this slightly.)

We need not follow such a Marxist lead; it leads nowhere, but we may still explicate expressive fetishes, as in Marx, and other functional fetishes. Some fetishes serve human interests as do-good instruments, like talismans and amulets, unlike expressive fetishes, which present the human mind and social life in a certain critical light without changing anything. The Catholic crucifix and Orthodox holy icons contribute to the spiritual well-being of the faithful and may also improve their daily lives. They are functional fetishes. An expressive fetish indicates a twisted attitude toward social reality. Its contents derive from original objects that transform into something else, living as if they were independent of the original objects. Marx's commodity fetishism is a perfect example of this: commodities become valuable in themselves, independently of their true origin and value. Similarly, early impressionist paintings are today commodities whose value in the art market reaches tens of millions of dollars. They are no longer art but something to buy, store, and resell with profit—and we admire them as famous money makers. Owning them enhances and expresses one's personal status among collectors.

We can apply the idea of expressive fetishism to Ubu Roi, understood as a thoroughly fantastic work that rejects any psychological and artistic basis and turns it into an alienated, fetishist frame.

The main expressive fetish in Ubu Roi is money, or finances and phynances: any mention of money as someone possessing it instead of using it, treats money as an expressive fetish. Certainly, money is often a functional fetish, especially when one thinks that money can buy the blue bird of happiness. One may believe that money solves all problems and can buy anything; in this case, money becomes a functional fetish. In a miser's case, money has intrinsic value; the point is to have cash in hand, not to use it. In this way, one fetishizes money by turning it from an instrumental value into an intrinsic one. Money is no longer a financial instrument—this is the miser's logic. People may keep large sums of cash at home because it makes them feel safe and secure; Japan is a notable example. In Ubu Roi, money is an expressive fetish.

Papa Ubu appreciates fine clothes and sausages. A sausage is a phallic symbol, just like what he calls the horn of Ubu—perhaps his penis. Perhaps the green candle contains another phallic reference? However, in no place in the play does Papa Ubu refer to buying something; he uses money only when necessary, for example, to bribe his troops—and he always complains bitterly about it.

FOURTH. And to raise money for the troops.

PAPA UBU. Ah, no! I'm going to kill you. I don't want to spend money. And another thing—I was once paid to make war and now I have to do it at my own expense. No, let's make war by my green candle since you are so set on it, but I don't pay a single coin.

ALL. Long live war!

2. Just So Story of Power and Greed

Jack Stinger (2025) offers a good account of the play's plot and characters.[1] Wikipedia offers the following, simplified and conventional, but basically accurate description. Ubu Roi is known as an absurdist play. However, the storyline is not at all absurd; on the contrary, it is blatantly conventional in its outline. We must therefore ask: why call it an absurdist play? My answer is that Papa Ubu is a crazy creation. Why? Because of his language, which reveals his psychology at this level, his Id. Papa Ubu is a play about language turning into Pata and exploding like fireworks. The interpretative key to the play is the dialectics of the world's decency and order that Papa Ubu's shit hook of language destroys.

As the play begins, Ubu's wife convinces him to lead a revolution and to kill the King of Poland and most of the royal family. The King's son, Bougrelas, and the Queen escape, but the latter later dies. The ghosts of dead kings appear to his son and call for revenge. Back at the palace, Ubu, now King, begins heavily taxing the people and killing the nobles for their wealth. Ubu's henchman [Bordure] gets thrown into prison; he then escapes to Russia, where he has the Tsar declare war on Ubu. As Ubu heads out to confront the invading Russians, his wife tries to steal the money and treasures in an ancient crypt. She is driven away by Bougrelas, who is leading a revolt of the people against Ubu. She runs away to her husband, Ubu, who has, in the meantime, been defeated by the Russians, abandoned by his followers, and attacked by a bear. Ubu's wife pretends to be the angel Gabriel to scare Ubu into forgiving her for her attempt to steal from him. They fight, and she is rescued by Bougrelas, who arrives after Ubu. Ubu knocks down the attackers with the body of the dead bear, after which he and his wife flee to France, which ends the play. . . .

The language of the play is a unique mix of slang code-words, puns, and near-gutter vocabulary, set to strange speech patterns. (I have slightly modified and corrected this account.)

The plot of Ubu Roi contains valid social criticism, revealing the dubious roots of Papa Ubu's power: greed and cruelty. The world ofJarry'splayis simplistic, and the characters are equally one-dimensionally traditional. The plot proceeds like a train on its tracks, revealing the horrid truth about the enemy stripped bare and glued to their fetishes. The Polish royal family, the Wenceslas, is the opposite force to the Ubus in all their depravity. They attack and rob the royals, but they also fear them—they lack the power to erase them all from the map. Thus, their victims become enemies who harass them until the very end. They finally succeed in escaping the justified wrath of the young prince Bougrelas by ship to France.

All this vice creates a black comedy of good and bad struggling against each other, except that this is another fetishist idea: the battle between good and evil, or between light and darkness, when the Sun was worshipped as the bringer of light and life, and darkness was seen as the cold, abyssal realm of death and destruction. When darkness arrives, it swallows everything, only to spit it out when the Sun returns to dominate the skies. However, the Zoroastrians retold the old story in a novel manner: in the final battle, good wins decisively. Judaism adapted this apocalyptic frame, and the Christians followed suit. After that, evil was weaker and more vulnerable simply because it would ultimately lose. Papa Ubu embodies the supreme moral evil, eliminating all scruples that might hinder his violent actions, but in the end, he must lose. According to this moral metaphysics, he represents the darkness of night over Poland, but ultimately, he is a loser when Bougrelas rises on the horizon.

Jarry portrays King Wenceslas as naïve and trusting, unable to understand the darkness at the door, while his Queen remains suspicious and clear-headed. She says Papa Ubu is a beast. Mama Ubu is the negative counterpart of the Queen. In this deadly symmetry, we can sense a touch of irony: it is all too obvious when it reflects the conventional Christian idea, good and bad clashing and slashing bellies and cutting necks, the good winning in the end. This theme dominates when the young Prince Bougrelas hunts and chases Papa Ubu, driving him away by boat to France. The King's family has their legal and moral right to rule, while Papa Ubu is a usurper who kills the King and places his crown on his own head—a stunningly conventional beginning, this. The storyline's stereotypical weaknesses form a strong contrast to what follows, making the moralistic beginning deceptive: the fireworks will soon begin. We find a slippery slope from banal decency to the ridiculously gross evil as a spectacle that the rest of the play celebrates.

Mama Ubu originally suggested the crime of usury to her husband—it was her idea. Here Eve offered the golden apple to Adam—and all hell broke loose. However, the Queen had already warned the King about this catastrophic possibility that he refused to take seriously. Indeed, Papa Ubu was loyal. First, he was horrified by the treason a servant of the King cannot consider. Remember, Ubu Roi was originally a puppet theatre play, and Jarry was a master puppeteer. Therefore, the characters are like puppets on a string, moving only when the strings are pulled and released. Now Mama Ubu pulls a string, and Papa Ubu moves out of his initial courtier's position and poses, entering another frame where he is a raving monster. He wants money, food, and fancy garments, but his mood varies between fear and courage, depending on the position of the puppeteer's strings. His mood switches on and off, almost mechanically, which is also the case with his attitude toward Mama: he threatens her, chases her, and wants to kill her; alternatively, he needs her and trusts her. The man is a dangerous beast at the mercy of his ever-changing moods. The play offers its first absurdity when courtier Ubu transmogrifies into a monstrous caricature of plain evil, and his language celebrates it.

The keyword here is ambiguity, on which the text rests. The reader now enters a fictional world that is blatantly nasty and ugly, yet given a chance, it could be something better. Of course, Papa Ubu's crimes dominate, and we will see that the text of the play betrays the normal, common-sense social world indecently. Nevertheless, the text, distorted as it is, supervenes on a moral structure that Jarry refused to hide, thus offering hope to his amazed audience. Let's see how Jarry does it. The key terms are loyalty and justice. He seems to follow Thomas Hobbes's dictum, derived from the Bible: "The Fool says there is no justice"—of course, there is an inbuilt, but often hidden, justice and injustice in all human affairs. Perhaps we say, "There is no justice," but then we posit the justice we claim to lack. We seek justice, and we believe we know what it is. We know we can behave justly even when we don't.

Originally, Papa Ubu appears to be a man of honour, a true akratic who desires good but lapses into evil. He kills the King when Mama Ubu pulls the right strings, leading him, a puppet, ever so gently onto the evil track. He gives the idea a thought and notices he can get all the fine clothes, sausages, and money, and then he springs into action, as if he had never hesitated. Here is the defining Patamoment of the play:

PAPA UBU. No, no! Me – Captain of Dragoons –

slaughter the King of Poland? I'd sooner die!

MAMA UBU (aside). Oh, pshite! – (Aloud.) Would

You rather remain as beggarly as a rat, Papa Ubu?

PAPA UBU. Bluebelly! by my green candle, I'd rather

be poor a beggar like a skinny and brave rat than being rich

like a mean and fat cat.

MAMA UBU. And the broad-brimmed hat? And the

umbrella? And the big cape?

PAPA UBU. And then what, Mama Ubu?

He leaves, banging the door.

Here, pshite means shit. Jarry, to avoid merde, coined merdre, which caused all the trouble among the original theatre audience; the play's gross language hurt the middle-class sensibilities in 1896. They could not know, before Freud, how the Id sounds.

Justice appears in three frames: divine or cosmic, moral, and legal, of which the latter need not be just at all. Legal justice can be unjust, as we all know, but now Bougrelas has his divine and legal right to inherit the throne of Poland after Papa Ubu killed the King and the two older princes. Mama Ubu sounds prophetic:

MAMA UBU. Listen once again. I am sure that young Bougrelas can beat you because he has justice on his side.

PAPA UBU. Ah, dirt! Isn't injustice just as worthy as justice? Ah, you abuse me, Mama Ubu. I'm going to cut you into little pieces!

Mama Ubu runs away, pursued by Ubu.

Papa Ubu shows his raw cynicism, and as usual, threatens Mama Ubu. He promises to cut her to pieces because such talk about justice sounds like a threat to him, and then he physically attacks her. Is Mama Ubu ironic here? I don't think so. She sounds honest when she appeals to moral and cosmic justice, and she correctly anticipates that the dear prince will prevail in the end. This is all about cosmic justice—the idea that the world is inherently good, which will prevent the monster from flourishing. The contemporary Christian middle-class audience wanted to believe that evil would ultimately prevail. The play, accordingly, is not that radical or cynical. The Ubus will lose, as they should, but his language will prevail.

King Ubu begins collecting taxes, his primary goal as King. He is the King, and he wants his legally due booty, as he reads the statutes. He interrogates the Polish nobles, and after learning how much they were worth, he puts them through a hole in the floor, where they would fall and go through a debraining machine—without doubt one of Jarry's finest inventions. Clearly, this is another impeccable anal reference that makes extermination excretion. Next, he wants to make laws, and therefore, he meets with the magistrates. His version of legal justice does not please the honest magistrates:

PAPA UBU. Hurry, if you please. Now I want to make laws.

SEVERAL. This we've got to see.

PAPA UBU. I'm going to reform justice first. After that, we will proceed to finances.

SEVERAL MAGISTRATES. We oppose all change.

PAPA UBU. Pshite! From now on, magistrates will no longer be paid.

MAGISTRATES. And what will we live on? We are poor.

PAPA UBU. You can have the fines you impose and the possessions of those you sentence to death.

The new King knows what to do: he will debrain them, and then his word is the law:

PAPA UBU. Into the hole with the magistrates!

They struggle in vain.

MAMA UBU. Hey, what are you doing, Papa Ubu? Who's to render justice now?

PAPA UBU. Me! You'll see how well things will go.

MAMA UBU. Yes, that'll be perfect.

PAPA UBU. Shut up, you brainless tart. And now, gentlemen, we proceed to matters of finance.

The ever-practical First Lady worries about the new laws of taxation and his methods of tax collection, but the King says he will personally go and rob the peasants of their money.

MAMA UBU. But really. Papa Ubu, what kind of a king are you? You slaughter everybody.

PAPA UBU. Hey pshite!

MAMA UBU. No more justice, no more finance.

PAPA UBU. Fear not, my sweet child. I'll go from village to village to collect the taxes in person.

He tries, but it all ends in an awful mess when fighting breaks out; the poor peasants argue they cannot afford to pay more taxes. They have already paid, and therefore, they have no money now.

We see how an honorable servant of the King so easily goes down the slippery slope to murder and robbery, and he takes the law into his hands, saying that injustice is as worthy as justice—which is to say that the laws of the land are no longer connected to moral and cosmic justice. Papa Ubu can now write the laws and legally seize all the money in his realm. He wants the blue bird he is not going to share with anyone. Then, he debrains the national elite and fights the peasants. Mama Ubu has good reasons to be worried, especially because the young Bougrelas is still alive and free, and cosmic justice is so firmly on his side. He will win, as Mama Ubu predicts. Papa Ubu does not listen.

All the talk about justice and the law is expressively fetishistic because it accomplishes nothing; it is not practical in the way ethics and morality should be. We can also describe it as ritualistic and ceremonial because people go through some sacred verbal motions, and that is all—they do what they want regardless. Michael Smith says that moral statements de dicto are fetishistic because they do not entail de re and de se attitudes. I say, Do not steal, which is a de dicto sentence; compare this with the following de se sentence: You steal, and I cut off the hand that sinned. We can see why the first sentence does not motivate as effectively as the second. Why would I respect the first prescription? Another de re sentence would be: Anyone who takes anything that belongs to others commits a crime, incurring negative consequences for the agent. This sentence concerns everyone.

However, in Act 5, Scene 1 of Jarry's play, all this changes. Mama Ubu was separated from Papa Ubu, who went to war, lost a battle, but managed to escape. Alone, like a vulture, she robs the crypt of the burial church of the ancient Polish kings but loses the treasure while running away from the Bougrelas supporting the Poles. Mama is desperate and anxious, yet her narrative is a long, silent, and coherent stream-of-consciousness soliloquy. At the same time, in the same dark cave, Papa Ubu sleeps. His dream is a remarkably absurdist mental burst, which resembles the Bishop's even more primitive reaction to death and dying in Doctor Faustroll. These two are the Id's answers to intolerable situations that go far beyond normal thought and understanding, unlike Mama's reflections at a higher level of the Ego. Papa has a violently bad dream:

... But go, accursed bear. You look just like Bordure! Do you hear, beast of Satan? No, he doesn't hear. The Snot-noses cut off his ears. That's it! Slaughter them! Cut off their ears! Take all their money! And drink yourself to death! That's the life of the Snot-noses—that's the luck of the Master of Finance.

He falls silent and sleeps.

Now Mama has a reason to fear Papa Ubu, whom she finally meets in the dark cave, hiding there just like she does. She prepares to defend herself. Papa Ubu wakes up, and she announces she is the archangel Gabriel, trying to scare him out of his wits. She then convinces him of his loyal wife's beautiful innocence and makes him forget the dirty little crime she committed. This is good comedy:

MAMA UBU (magnifying her voice). Yes, Mister Ubu, someone speaks indeed, and the trumpet of the archangel which shall draw the dead from the ash and the final dust would not speak therwise! Listen to this stern voice. It is the voice of the Archangel Gabriel,

who can only give good advice.

The angel defends the hapless wife:

MAMA UBU. You aren't listening, Mister Ubu. Lend us a more attentive ear. (Aside.) But we must hurry, the day is about to break. Mr. Ubu, your woman is adorable and delicious. She doesn't have a single fault.

PAPA UBU. You're mistaken. There isn't a single fault she doesn't possess.

MAMA UBU. Silence! Your woman has never been unfaithful to you.

PAPA UBU. I'd like to see the man that would want her. What a harpy.

He stubbornly defends himself against the angelic accusation of crimes. The moral themes make a return:

PAPA UBU. All I say is true. My wife is a rogue, and what a fathead you are!

MAMA UBU. Take care, Papa Ubu!

PAPA UBU. Ah, that's right. I forgot who I was talking to. No, I didn't say what I just said.

MAMA UBU. You killed Wenceslas [the King].

PAPA UBU. That was not of course my fault. It's what Mama Ubu wanted.

MAMA UBU. You killed Boleslas and Ladislas [Polish Prices].

PAPA UBU. Too bad for them! They wanted to hit me!

MAMA UBU. You broke your promise to Bordure [his henchman], and then you killed him.

PAPA UBU. I'd rather it was me that reigns in Lithuania than him. At present you can see it isn't either of us. At least, you can see it isn't me.

Papa Ubu soon realizes who she is and attacks her in full force. She has a reason to be afraid of him:

MAMA UBU. Oh, mercy, Mister Ubu!

PAPA UBU. Are you finished? Then I'll begin: twisting of the nose, extraction of hair, penetration of

the ears with a small stick, and the extraction of the brains through the heels, laceration of the bottom, partial or even total suppression of the bone marrow – if that will remove the spininess of your character – not forgetting the cutting open of the bladder, and finally the grand beheading a la Saint John the Baptist, the whole drawn from the holy writings of both the Old Testament and the New, set in order, corrected and perfected by the here-present Master of Finance! How does that suit? You, fathead?

He goes to lacerate her.

MAMA UBU. Mercy, Mister Ubu!

His Biblical threats are not only verbal because he lacerated her bottom. However, the most brilliant threat is to remove her brain through her heels—I find this an earth-shattering idea, at the same time so cruel, supremely imaginary, and totally crazy. It must be one of the most memorable Pataimages in the play, or in any play for that matter. This slur is the crowning moment in the play, with its treasure being this brain extraction method—a superb, ingenious form of torture. A long time ago, when I first heard about it, this Patamoment changed my life. Now I understand the true meaning of cruelty: it involves enjoying tedious work and using brilliant imagination to inflict real harm. I became a fan of Papa Ubu. Later, I realized that Sade had never imagined this form of punishment, even though he wanted to list them all.

However, the angelic advice comes from a high moral authority and concerns him, Papa Ubu. He should react positively—but of course, he cannot do so. He repeats the bad things about his wife and then denies his crimes. At daybreak, they realize that they are both in danger. As their enemies arrive, they must flee again. In the cave, they killed a bear, which is a traditional symbol of Russia, but now the Poles are ad portas. He hits them with the carcass of the bear—a highly symbolic event. The Poles and the Russians are after them, but now he has used the defeated Bear against the Poles. And then they run again.

The Ubu couple stick together regardless of how they talk to and think of each other, but it does not look like a love-hate relationship; rather, it seems they genuinely hate each other, yet at the same time, they recognize they need each other in their ever-hostile world of robbery, murder, and war. Mama Ubu stole the ancient treasure in the crypt, and the reaction of Papa Ubu is predictable. Mama Ubu called him Mister Ubu, a title that now has a strong alienating effect.

However, he may have lost the battle, but we have already seen that Papa Ubu knows how to wage war, too. He rides his Mr. Phynance-Horse, shouting,

Back to the outposts, my boy. The Russians are not far off, and we will have soon to draw our weapons and attack with everything we've got – pshite, phynances and physick-stick.

The physick-stick is a defensive weapon:

As for us, we will stay inside the and will fire with our phynance-gun through the window. Across the door we'll place the physick-stick and if someone tries to enter, we'll use the pshite-hook!

Papa Ubu can attack, but his moods change from elation to depression; his emotions range from terrible fright to courageous bravery. Here, he suffers from one of his manic bouts and attacks:

PAPA UBU. Hey! I'll do that at once. Let's go! Pshitesword, do your duty, and you, money-crook, don't remain behind. Physics-stick, emulate them unstintingly, and share with this swagger stick the honour of slaughtering, burying and abusing the Muscovite emperor. Forward, Mr. Horse of Phynances!

What are these weapons like? The mystery looks unsolvable: phynance gun, shit-sword, money-crook, shit-hook, swagger-stick, the Horse of Phynances, debraining machine, money wagon—fetishes, all these. And two words constantly accompany each other: money and shit, until the reader realizes the truth of their ambivalence that makes money shit and shit money. War is shit, but necessary for robbing more money. Killing the nobles and the magistrates is shit that transmogrifies into gold, as the physics-stick works. Dialectically, posit shit and negate it, thus you get money; ask what the truth of money is—it is gold, wealth, honour, status, sausages, armies, and ever more gold. Nevertheless, gold reeks of innocent blood, warfare, and all the vagaries of power. Phynances rule, but only where the shit-hooks are available and used right, which happens only when we obey the physick-stick's advice and emulate it. Papa Ubu tries very hard, but he finds himself incapable of controlling all that shit, even when his lovely, faithful wife is around to help him. They gain and lose their money, but ultimately, they will sail away from it.

They both need shit, money, and science, which is exactly what modern warfare is, if Ukraine may beat the Russian Bear. Soon after Jarry's time, the shit of war became evident in the Great War: Long live war, and indeed, it did. Physics is obviously related to Pataphysics; concerning phynances, we don't know how it differs from economics, finances, and money. Physics may also refer to the physick-stick, that meticulously magical fetish that complements the expressive power of the green candle in its veiled symbolism. In Jarry's Dr. Faustroll, the physick-stick is a mechanical logic machine that unifies contradictions and regulates ambiguities: Dr. Faustroll is taller than himself, and in the end, dead and alive at the same time, not like a pious Christian, dead on Earth and alive in Heaven. The Doctor is dead and alive at the same time in the same place. This is what the physick-stick used to do, but now its scope of applications and effects is redefined for use in warfare.

3. The Power of Language

Ubu Roi is a dark comedy where the shit hits the fan, and irony and sarcasm sprinkle around those mysterious words whose exact meaning the reader may in vain try to guess, but that is not all. The comic aspects are obvious when Papa Ubu's mind switches between extremes. The play is a dark comedy. Here is a simple example of his comical mood changes when Papa Ubu goes to war:

SOLDIERS and PALADINS. Long live Papa Ubu! Ting, ting, ting; ting, ting, ting; ting, ting, tating!

PAPA UBU. Oh, the brave people. I adore them!

A Russian cannonball arrives and breaks off a vane of the mill.

PAPA UBU. Ah! I'm scared. Lord God, I'm dead! And yet, no – I've no injuries.

Another example of the same, with reciprocal rights:

PAPA UBU. Forward!! Ah you, mister – you that I'm hitting because you tried to hit me first – do you hear? You bag of wine, with your musket that doesn't go off.

THE RUSSIAN. Is that so?

He shoots him with a revolver.

PAPA UBU. Ah! Oh! I am wounded! I am pierced! I am punched! I'm done for! I'm buried! Except that he missed! Ah! I got him! (He rips him open.) Now start something!

The comedy is obvious, and so is Jarry's extreme creativity with the language of the play—to say nothing of his willingness to attack the fine sensibilities of his theatre audiences. One show was enough to close the theatre for now. We find a parallel with M. de Sade, who originally wanted to be a playwright. He wrote seventeen plays, of which only one was staged in Paris, but was cancelled after a riot among the audience. The problem with Sade's plays was that the characters and plots lacked sympathetic elements that would allow the audience to identify with them. In Jarry's case, its relentless black humor saves the play, but only if the audience tolerates the foul language. This was more or less impossible in Jarry's time, unlike today, when audiences don't react to such trivialities as cussing and cursing on stage, or to blood, gore, and frontal nudity. Today's Woke ideology reacts to other things, and today's US MAGA react aggressively to Woke and even to DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion). Woke's transformation into a byword of social awareness started decades ago, but began to be more broadly known in 2008, with the release of Erykah Badu's song "Master Teacher" (https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/woke-meaning-origin):

Even if yo baby ain't got no money


To support ya baby,

(I stay woke)


Even when the preacher tell you some lies


And cheatin on ya mama, you stay woke


(I stay woke)


Even though you go through struggle and strife


To keep a healthy life, I stay woke


(I stay woke)


Everybody knows a black or a white there's creatures in every shape and size


Everybody


(I stay woke)

Paradoxically, Ubu Roi may well qualify as a Woke-proof text: Mama is a strong character who successfully challenges Papa, the text ridicules war and violence, recognizes the power of justice, presents fetishes as they are, and happily plays with mad technologies. As a dark comedy, it is a wonderful literary and linguistic tour de force, showcasing rhetorical creativity, irony, sarcasm, fetishisms, irreligiosity, expressive power, and, most of all, prophetic truthfulness. Ubu Roi offers us John's head on a silver plate in 1896, when the world was still young. Germany emerged as a rising power after defeating France in the Franco-Prussian War (1870). The French dreamed of a revanche, and everyone was making treaties against each other. The Bolshevik Revolution and the Great War then prepared the ground for all these future Ubus, such as Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, Hoxha, Mao, Kim Il Sung, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Suharto, and Sukarno. In Africa, notable random examples include Idi Amin, Mugabe, and Sid Barre. The list is shockingly long. We are suckers for dictators, as Jarry saw, of whose curse we are not yet free in 2025. We continue to have eager candidates: Trump, Erdogan, Netanyahu, and Orbán, to name a few.

Jarry told it all when he was a 23-year-old puppeteer and rising absurdist writer. Ubu Roi anticipates the story about the murdered Romanian strongman Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena. This Mama Ubu pretended to be a chemistry professor and got a notable chemistry prize when visiting Finland in 1971. She never wrote a single chemistry paper. The Filipina Mama Ubu, Imelda Marcos, reportedly amassed a collection of 10,000 pairs of shoes and bras, which was discovered after Ferdinand Marcos' regime collapsed. However, humor does not quite fit such dictatorial narratives, which are often too tragic for that. In Indonesia, Sukarno slaughtered half a million communist suspects in 1966-1966, supported by the CIA, of course.

Jarry anticipates the tragic absurdity of human societies' inability to defend themselves against tyranny and dictatorial power. Also, he hints at reasons, which are the pet fetishes of these men. Many of them, in Africa, wanted personal wealth. Some were driven by a search for absolute power, like Stalin. Hitler worshipped war and national purity, among other things. Of course, the British Commonwealth, along with its maximally cruel system of slavery in America, was rigged for exploitation and robbery, under the umbrella of Kipling's supremely ironic slogan White Man's Burden.

One can stage and enjoy Ubu Roi today, but one reads the following with awe and shudder. Jarry was an ironist and a laughing prophet of freedom and justice, worthy of so many Kiplings. The world has changed, the colonies and colonists are gone, but the tyrannies and dictators are still there, which makes Jarry's play still relevant. Kipling writes about his White Man's Burden:

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives' need.

To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild—

Your new-caught sullen peoples,

Half devil and half child.

Jarry shows us what is "half devil and half child"—the usurper and conqueror, Papa Ubu. And Jarry himself was half devil and half child, an artist armed with a swagger stick, physick-stick, a shit sword and shit word, a pen, gallons of booze, a revolver, a boat, and a stolen bicycle. Jarry reveals the fetishistic motives of big-state power and its capacity to mobilize their masses of people who then move silently like lambs to meet their butchers. Long Live War, they shout, then they regret it all, return to their sullen self-pity, denialism, and full amnesia. They want to go on with their lives as if nothing happened—think of the Russians in Russia under Vladimir Putin. Jarry's play deserves to be popular. Long live Pata!

4. Conclusion: The Tactics of U-attack

Ubu Roi is a paradoxical play —or we might call its structure dialectical, setting normal reality against its crazy language, which is the source of all evil—and such celebratory evil is far from Arendtian banality. What could be more banal than the idea of the banality of evil? The moral message is clear, with justice playing a strong role in its two forms — cosmic and moral — while simultaneously dismissing legal justice, which tends toward masked immorality, as King Ubu the lawmaker demonstrates.

The play has its conventional foundation and most of its scenes are strangely humorous: evil cannot win, and King Ubu must lose the war and surrender his beloved phynances. And he cannot kill his wife, whom he needs to the bitter end. The play is conventional; this level is neither radical nor absurd. The usurper rises, kills the king, robs the citizens, fights the remnants of the royal family, loses, and escapes to France. Ubu himself is a paradigmatic dictator, and like many real political villains in 20th-century world politics, he embodies tyranny. The play is prophetic when it argues that after all that royal power, there will be men of phynances, billionaires and robber barons, who will have all the money and power. At the same time, Jarry refers to cosmic justice, which will still be a force to reckon with. He gives us some hope concerning the future.

The source of absurdity is the play's magical language, emanating from its dialogue, which indeed is crazier and more uninhibited than anything a theatre audience was familiar with. Now they faced all that shit. Papa Ubu's sudden turns of mind, switches of mood, expressions of violence, cruelty, and greed are all superb masterpieces of creative writing. Here is an example called, in the mock military jargon, a U-attack: We charge forward first and then in the opposite direction, first against the enemy and then away from them. Then we claim success. This is how the Master of Phynances does it:

PAPA UBU. Ah! That's our cue to get out of here. Therefore, gentlemen of Poland, forward! Or rather, Backward!

The tortures Ubu imagines are, at the same time, childishly hilarious and supremely nasty. His tools, such as the debraining machine and physick-stick, are intriguing, unlike the hole in the floor where they dispose of their victims. Its anal reference is clear. All this is a firework of language and dialogue that forms the supremely absurd halo in the play—think about the Green Candle and the Horn of Ubu, to say nothing of his noble Mr. Horse of Phynances. All this is pure Pata.

In this way, a conventional story wears the dress of absurd Patalanguage—dialectically, the World is the thesis, its negation is expressed in terms of the crazy Language, and the final truth is the Horror of it all—or, is it Comedy? Alternatively, we may say that the world and the language clash, creating a dynamic pair that keeps the audience in its grip. They may get the impression that the play is more absurd than it is. Ultimately, what we have here is an ambiguous ontology that sets language against reality, claiming that the world is an absurdly revolting experience because of how we speak of it. The world, according to Ubu, is a horrible place, full of blood and gore, the field of uninhibited greed, and full of fetishistic desire—but this is only the effect of Jarry's chosen language in the play. When the Ubu-couple escapes and sails towards France, Poland may or may not return to normal under their rightful king, Bougrelas. This is the ultimate fetishistic feature of the play: the loyal royal courtier, Mr. Ubu, becomes evil incarnate, so his escape signifies the disappearance of evil from Poland—or, more precisely, the eradication of the language of evil. However, we know that the social world remains a nasty place ruled by Pata. Remember, bird is the word, and God's name is not Jack.

References

[1] J. Stinger, Theater Director (https://www.jackstigner.co.uk/ubu-roi/ubu-roi-plot-summary.html) (accessed 22.9.2025).