Because Bernhard’s characters dwell on madness, suicide, despair, death, disease, the decay of society, it might be tempting to see him as misanthropic or depressing, but as Reis rightly points out, once you manage to get into the rhythm of the writing and realise Bernhard is reaching for the absurd, then his writing becomes exhilaratingly funny.
However, it wouldn’t be right to describe Bernhard as a writer who finds the comic in every situation. There are times in his novels where Bernhard is genuinely moved by the tragedy of his characters. This is the case with the Persian woman in Yes, Joana in Woodcutters and Anna in Concrete – notably all women who take their own lives after being betrayed by life.
Back to the humour in Bernhard, and particularly in Old Masters. It’s humour from the edge of the abyss, which is where Bernhard’s characters are always found.
Caught between sanity and insanity; life and death; suicide and ploughing on; genius and idiocy, Bernhard’s protagonists are invariably artists or intellectuals – actors, writers, scientists, architects – driven towards chaos by their need to fulfil some great work they've conceived, which they can't start or can't finish. For them, art and the intellectual life is not salvation but self-destruction.
Being an artist or intellectual demands isolation and solitude but at the same time men and women always live in society and in communion with others. And what happens when your intellectual or artistic endeavours founder – as they invariably do – is that you obsess and fulminate against those you perceive have intruded on your genius and scurrilously imposed their will or desires on you and are responsible for your failure – your parents, siblings, friends, teachers, the critics who judge your work, actors and readers who interpret it, politicians, the church, the state, and ultimately nature, the entire array of your tormentors and oppressors who have prevented you from being who you think you were meant to be.