"Desolation Row"

Bob Dylan, 50th Anniversary Collection (Legacy/Columbia 2015)

"When Kafka read aloud to his friends from the first chapter of the Trial, he began laughing so hard that he 'could not continue reading at times,' and listeners were also laughing 'uncontrollably.' This is 'astonishing,' [Max] Brod [Kafka's friend a literary executor] wrote, 'in light of the terrible gravity of this chapter. But that is how it was.'" (Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years 477).  

I don't know what Bob Dylan thinks of the lyrics to "Desolation Row." I have no idea if he thinks the song is funny or frightening or just another song on a contractually obligated album in 1965. The "limited edition" mp3 copyright dump bonus upon purchasing the then $500 version of The Bootleg Series Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge offers a few live versions of the song from 1965. In the two complete versions featured in the collection, the listener can hear the audience laugh. This is especially true at the notorious Forrest Hills show, where the audience repeatedly booed and eventually stormed the stage. That, however, took place during the "electric" set; "Desolation Row" was played during the much more warmly received acoustic set. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9Mp_1ZDjqI

It's a bit jarring to hear the Forrest Hills audience titter after the first line of the song, "They're selling postcards of the hanging," followed by an ever increasing round of laughs with each successive lyric in the song. "The beauty parlor's filled with sailors/the circus is in town" seems to elicit the biggest laugh. 

The first part of the song evokes an actual historical event which took place in Duluth, Minnesota in 1920. In June of that year The John Robinson circus came to town and with it three black laborers who were eventually accused of rape. While being held in the local jail overnight, three of the accused men were kidnapped from the jail and lynched by a white mob of 1,000-10,000 citizens. 

Though there does not appear to be any post-cards produced of the Duluth lynchings, lynching postcards were a common phenomenon in the 19th and early 20th centuries, so, though a seemingly jarring combination of language (why would anyone want photographic evidence of a hanging to collect or send?) is confirmed by the historical record. 

In 1912 the German sociologist and travel writer Arthur Holitscher published his book Amerika Heute und Morgen. https://archive.org/details/amerikaheute00holirich/page/366/mode/2up which Kafka himself had read. On page 367 Holitscher reproduces a photograph of a lynching with the bitter caption "Idyll in Oklahoma." A few pages later he reproduces a painting showing a group of white men holding up the dead body of an African American man. Underneath Holitscher writes "thousands of copies of these postcards were printed and sent." All of this would inspire Kafka to write about a possible salvation for his re-named character "Negro" (Karl Rossmann) within the "Nature Theater of Oklahoma" chapter of Amerika (The Man Who Disappears). 

"The only sound that's left/ after the ambulances go/ is Cinderella sweeping up on Desolation Row" Audience laughs and claps. Are they laughing at the ambulances? Cinderella finding herself as a character in this nightmare scenario? Strong applause for Einstein playing the electric violin. The cyanide hole doesn't get the big laugh you might expect. Truth be told, as the song goes on the audience laughs less. Perhaps they've figured out that Dylan hasn't really written a funny song. Or he's written a song full of foolish characters and impossible situations wherein the more you laugh, the more deadly that laugh becomes.