Alphonse Allais

Who was Alphonse Allais?

Alphonse Allais was a French writer and humorist born in Honfleur, Calvados.

He is the author of many collections of whimsical writings. A poet as much as a humorist, he cultivated the verse form known as holorhyme, i.e. made up entirely of homophonous verses, where entire lines are pronounced the same. For example:

Par les bois du djinn où s'entasse de l'effroi,

Parle et bois du gin, ou cent tasses de lait froid.

Allais wrote the earliest known example of a completely silent musical composition. His Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man of 1897 consists of nine blank measures. It predates similarly silent but intellectually serious works by John Cage and Erwin Schulhoff by many years. His prose piece "Story for Sara" was translated and illustrated by Edward Gorey.

Allais participated in humorous exhibitions, including those of the Salon des Arts Incohérents of 1883 and 1884, held at the Galerie Vivienne. At these, inspired by his friend Paul Bilhaud's 1882 exhibit of an entirely black painting entitled "Negroes fight in a tunnel", Allais exhibited arguably some of the earliest examples of conceptual art: his plain white sheet of Bristol paper Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par un temps de neige and a similar red work Apoplectic Cardinals Harvesting Tomatoes on the Shore of the Red Sea.

Famous Quotes:

• Coffee is a beverage that puts one to sleep when not drank.