With the Breakfast Ape, the simian mouthpiece for the indefatigably double-secret-ironic sensibility of Charlottesville, Virginia-based visual artist Ramsey Arnaoot, a newly indestructible figure marches onto the stage of pop cultural life. Just as quickly, he marches off again. "Join me when I investigate crime," he invites his reader. Are you investigating crime now, asks his sidekick? No, says Breakfast Ape; and exeunt omnes.

The autonomous logic of the Breakfast Ape fleshes itself out with the manifesto of 'The Breakfast Ape is a Stand Up Guy.' After a childish joke, the Breakfast Ape has a good laugh, only to cry out, "Wait, I think I may have," as the curtains go down. Here again is a concluding experience of reversal and truncation, like that earlier with his announcement of, and refusal to begin, an investigation of crime, playing on the qualifier 'when.' An adventure is promised, then slips inexplicably out of reach.

It is a careful grammar of lacunae that constructs the Breakfast Ape's narrative. The mots d'escalier that go unsaid, the things we should have done and didn't, and a sustained embarrassment and regret so grotesquely severe as to be hilarious: this is the subterranean landscape the Breakfast Ape lays bare. Breakfast Ape's mannered guilelessness devastates; he telegraphs an anti-heroic sense of modern life, bungled and covered up. It has the sardonic twist of that old signature in a high school yearbook, "I'll see you in hell when I kill mys--", crossed out and replaced with, "Thanks for a wonderful year and have a great summer, Austin."

In his magisterial little essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," Clement Greenberg included comics in his litany of kitsch offenders, coming after pulp fiction and before Tin Pan Alley music. Mr. Arnaoot's young creation turns Greenberg on his ear, transporting the low-brow genre of comics to the advance guard. Kitsch, writes Greenberg, "predigests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him with a short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art. . . . [K]itsch is synthetic art." The Breakfast Ape instead fulfills Greenberg's definition of the avant-garde; he is a painting of cause, rather than kitch's canvas of effect. The Breakfast Ape documents the genesis of synthetic art, discussing, successfully, the process of drawing himself humorously, and failing, in the strip 'Existence Is Futile.'

There are few entertainment forms as predigested as contemporary humor. From the glasses of Woody Allen to the inexorable chin of Jay Leno, American humor arrives as readymade fetishized pabulum. One wonders why Comedy Central does not give up and run a loop of humor as purified kitsch: to wit, a man receiving a custard pie to the face and a knee to the groin. It is the Breakfast Ape's singular achievement to rise into the rarefied ranks of self-exegetical humorsmithy. This tradition includes some of the light moments in the novels of Jane Austen, Kafka's reading aloud from The Trial when he could not deliver the execution scene without laughing hysterically, and the single juncture in Steve Martin's career when he declared that humor is a serious business and donned an arrow-through-the-skull headband. The Ape has arrived.

The Breakfast Ape represents, like the writing of Wayne Koestenbaum, a window onto the uniquely captivating subjectivity of its creator, and the comic thrill of mundane degradation characterizes the work of both men. Consider the following stanza from Koestenbaum's 'Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender':

1978
He worked at a gas station,
or wore a gas station
jersey -- or I blew him
near a gas station.

Ramsey Arnaoot may not enjoy being, as Koestenbaum certainly enjoys being, a gay opera-loving Harvard-Yale poet-confessionalist golden shower cognoscento. I have, however, known Mr. Arnaoot over the course of two decades, and I know that he has harbored an exquisite stone-faced camp sensibility the equal of Koestenbaum's since early childhood. All that waits is for the Breakfast Ape to discover fellatio.