It's a well-known anecdote that Kafka would laugh uncontrollably during private readings of his stories, but the significance of that laughter is usually left ambiguous. It's told with an air of incomprehension in the way that one talks about how Einstein would forget to wear socks, as if genius were a kind of unknowable mental illness. Kafka is hilarious, but only after you accept his work as a true reflection of a real mental state. The idea of Kafka as humorous is jarring to most of his readers, i.e. students. Teenagers (hopefully) still cling to a sentimental vision of the world, so high school or college readers recoil from the labyrinthine nightmare of his writing as a fever dream that should be forgotten quickly. An older reader, who has (hopefully) gazed into the abyss and has in turn had the abyss gaze back into them, is ready to appreciate Kafka's humor. His writing is deeply ironic, but unlike the conventionally satirical irony that maintains a critical distance from its subject, he treats the subject with simultaneous seriousness and irony. His writing is about himself, his world, bureaucracy, the approaching dark clouds of Fascism in Europe, all very nontrivial subjects that one cannot simply sneer away. But one can decouple the deathy serious reality of one's subjective suffering and trivialize it by disassociating from their own selfhood. We take the grim hopelessness of life for granted, but there emerges a ironic humor from recognizing the absurd seriousness with which we treat our banal unhappiness. The horror of the abyss' gaze is the recognition of our own nothingness. If, however, we come to terms with that horror, being nothing ceases to be a monstrous prospect and becomes liberatory. Kafka's laughter is the laugh of one who sees their misery from outside themselves, the laugh of the void.
Anyway, this is supposed to be about music. Nobody's New York isn't funny, but it is about the misery of material life, and like Kafka, that misery is not self-pitying but the acceptance of a fact. Work is a scam, but considering most of the rich kids I know it doesn't seem like not working is any better, and "making it" as an artist or musician these days seems to be even worse. The arts industries have become too streamlined to risk their money on anything but a sure bet, something wholly complacent and preferably a transparent copy of something already popular, so anyone who puts their integrity ahead of their success is out of luck. So we keep going to work, but there's a certain dignity in not surrendering ourselves to work, not forgetting that it will always be a scam. An old Stoic motto, "nec spe, nec metu", roughly "no hope, no fear", puts it neatly. To truly give up hope is not to succumb to fear but to be free from it. When we disavow our concern for achievement we also disavow our concern for failure, which does not lead to a nihilistic recklessness but rather a disinterested sobriety. Nobody's New York is freedom: the bliss of walking to work in the cold with your hands in your pockets, the rapture of not caring what the richer, more popular, more expensively dressed social climbers at the art opening think, the joy of being nobody, of leaving the world behind.
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