Abstract
The Danish thinker Soren Kierkegaard is one of the most cited authors of the comic theorist, Vladimír Borecký. Kierkegaard defines the comic in a rather narrower way: it occurs only where there is a painless contradiction.
Kierkegaard more or less reflects all four Borecký's figures of the comic, i.e. irony, humour, absurdity and naivety. These figures, most expressly the absurdity, are in Kierkegaard meant to serve (his) Christian spiritual path.
Borecký, on the other hand, does not regiment these individual figures. And in works of many artists, such as Franz Kafka, but also in encounters of the ancient Chinese masters of Chán Buddhism (some of whom do not follow anybody's instructions), the figures of the comic, especially humor and absurdity, are more loosely intertwined.
They at least in practice shake conceptual barriers more consistently than Kierkegaard.