"Another bunch of young people will appear, and find us very old-fashioned, and they will write ballads denouncing us, and there is no reason why they shouldn't."

Alfred Jarry just may be the great-grandfather of a couple of heroes from our own modern culture -- in his "Gestes et Opinions du Docteur Faustroll, Pataphysicien," Jarry introduced the characters of Panmuphle (or Big Nose) and Bosse-de-Nage (Buttock Face), one of whom happened to sound suspiciously like our friend Butt-head, uttering a seemingly endless string of monotone 'Ha-Ha's." Hmmmmmmm...

Jarry, by Picasso.

The young Pablo Picasso was so impressed by Jarry's finesse with weapons that he began aping him by carrying around an equal number of firearms. (Later, he would amass a vast collection of Jarry manuscripts, as well as acknowledging Jarry's influence on his Cubist period.)

"We maintain," writes the surrealist Andre Breton, "that beginning with Jarry, much more than with [Oscar] Wilde, the differentiation long considered necessary between art and life has been challenged, to wind up annihilated as a principle."

In 1927 Antonin Artaud and Roger Vitrac founded the "Theatre Alfred Jarry," which proposed "to contribute by strictly theatrical means to the ruin of the theater as it exists today in France."

In 1945 Cyril Connolly dubbed Pere Ubu the "Santa Claus of the Atomic Age."