James O. Incandenza: a filmography (pp. 992–993)
It Was a Great Marvel That He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him. […] A father (Watt), suffering from the delusion that his etymologically precocious son (Smothergill) is pretending to be mute, poses as a ‘professional conversationalist’ in order to draw the boy out.
Context
The "(Hal)" panel, and the bleakest joke in the filmography: a father so sure his precocious son is only pretending to be mute that he disguises himself as a hired conversationalist to trick the boy into talking. The Gnostic title — a son inside the father who doesn't know him — pushes the gag into metaphysics: the father cannot recognize his own child and has to pay a stranger, who is himself, to reach him. This is the film of the professional-conversationalist scene, and the insight is that the father's love can only arrive in costume, routed through a whole apparatus of misrecognition.