Intro
Comedy is a play, movie or any other form of entertainment that can make you laugh. Absurd comedy is comedy that goes beyond the realm of believability. Absurd comedy is purely illogical and completely senseless.
An example would be singing a really cheery song before an execution or perhaps your own death. The absurdity could also be coming to a conclusion through similarities between subjects that really mean nothing, like you might want to hang a thief but need proof to do so and you might come up with something like this: thieves get hanged, but you also hang tapestries, tapestries are made of yarn, but teddies are mad of yarn as well, so, if someone weighs the same as a teddy bear, they’re made of yarn and therefore a thief.
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Other examples of absurd comedy are Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, which use ridiculous things such as caterpillars smoking hookah, or flamingos used as croquet mallets. As you could tell from all of those examples, absurd comedy is lacking in anything that could make sense because the ridiculousness of it all makes it all the funnier.
Historical Perspective
Absurd humour/comedy also known as Surreal humour/comedy is a form of drama that emphasizes the absurdity of human existence by adding meaningless dialogue, logical development, confusing situations, scenes that not realistic or logic based and behaviour that is obviously illogical. A Danish philosopher called Søren Kierkegaard was the one who founded the term called Absurdism in the 19th century. Through his existentialist philosophy He also opposed the crisis that human also faced with a term called absurdism.
Absurd humour was first performed by the Europeans and American dramatists in the 1950s and the early 1960s. These were the people who agreed the famous philosopher Albert Camus’s essay about the human situation is essentially absurd, called “The Myth of Sisyphus” written in the 1942.
Famous Practitioners
There have been hundreds of groups and even more people who have performed Absurd humour, however few have ever been able to master it. There are some legends in life, such as Steve Martin, Rowan Atkinson, and much more importantly the Entirety of Monty Python. Steve Martin was well known for his ability to improvise, and his skill in just going that little bit over the top for humour, he is perhaps best known for his Ruprecht scene, in which he plays a total imbecile called Ruprecht (well, a character called Freddy Benson, who is playing Ruprecht, it’s complicated alright), who is an interesting character.
Rowan Atkinson, as I’m sure we all know, is famous for combining Slapstick and Absurdity together, most notably as Mr Bean. Monty Python on the other hand, have not only six different movies, over a dozen books, and six different TV shows, one of which had four seasons. FOUR! Monty Python soon became legends in the comedy world, and let’s be honest, it’s because they’re hilarious. While Rowan Atkinson may be the most known out of the above, Steve Martin is nowhere near unimportant, and Monty Python all but made Absurdity humour famous.
Conclusion
Absurd Humour has been used for many years and has evolved depending on the era, starting in the 1950s all the way to today and even though the style is kind of unheard of by name, anyone who enjoys comedy will know some sort of Monty Python or Rowan Atkinson film or technique. Absurd humour can be very difficult to create without over lapping other genres. This is the main reason not many people are able to successfully portray this style of comedy. However there is the few that are able to.
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