How old is absurd humour?Ībsurd humour has been around at least since the Middle Ages. In the absurd world, even lunchboxes can have personalities and driver’s licenses and a human being can think they’re a lunchbox.Ībsurd humour can play upon the absurdity within a joke itself, either reversing, neutralising or furthering that absurdity for a laugh. And it’s not just animals that can have human characteristics. AnthropomorphismĪnthropomorphism is common in absurd humour. The use of random elements like ‘a shrubbery’ pervades this type of humour. Before the terrified King Arthur can pass them, they demand he bring them, of all things, a shrubbery.) (In The Holy Grail, the Knights of Ni shout the word ‘Ni!’ to dominate their foes. Through the juxtaposition of incongruous entities, personalities, values or behaviours, absurd humour creates scenarios in which the characters have nonsensical manifestations, aims or perspectives. The Vatican’s view that ‘every sperm is sacred’ is taken to its extreme and then given a nudge – they have so many children, the parents are forced to sell them for scientific experimentation.) They have bred so many children, when a baby plops out of the mother, she is neither surprised nor excited. (In Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, a Catholic mother and father have followed the dictates of the Vatican by breeding dozens. The implausibility of his inflexibility is the key to the comedy.Ībsurd or nonsense humour highlights the ridiculousness of life, pushing normally accepted realities to nonsense extremes, giving the audience a fresh perspective. In The Holy Grail, The Black Knight believes he can still put up a fight, though his arms and legs have been hacked off (‘I can still bleed on you!’) Once we accept that he believes it, we accept that he’s behaving rationally on his own terms. Even if the characters are operating under an absurd belief or obsession, once we accept that they genuinely believe in it, we can see that they are behaving rationally. Monty Python’s absurd comedyĪbsurd comedy such as the work of Monty Python shows largely intelligent and rational characters reacting in realistic ways. But Absurd Humour seems to ignore contradiction and neutralising expectation in favour of a kind of negation – an entirely distinct concept. All humour points to the absurd in life, in that it generally turns on a logical contradiction or defies a logical expectation. But there are some general guidelines to the art. Typically, each absurd joke or scenario is a world unto itself and has few specifics in common with other jokes in the genre. Absurd comedy, or humour, mocks any detailed analysis.
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