Eric Andre, Connor O'Malley, Gmod videos, Tim and Eric Show, etc. all things that tickle my brain. I can't help but think there's a relationship between enjoying crazy ass content and having a clear understanding of the insane capitalist system I live in.
Absolutely. Camus, Sartre, and Beauvoir were all socialists. Existentialism is what you're left with when you have that basic materialist understanding of the world that underlies socialism. You're rejecting dogma and cultural narratives, the two things which create a belief in some creation story instead of the materialist idea of evolution. If there is no grand plan, you're either stuck with the reactionary route of being le reddit atheist in a cultural battle with religion or you're stuck with the leftist need to analyse the mechanics of things and build something constructive rather than destructive out of the circumstances you're given. Existentialism is reclaiming the authority right-wingers hand over to god and his divinely anointed kings.
Absurdism is what happens when you really think about that with an intuitive or intentional Marxist perspective. Being confronted with the absence of god's plan has the same psychic effect of working a meaningless job, it's a kind of alienation which feels existentially terrifying. Absurdism defines that as one more force to be confronted toward the same goal of self-actualisation in a world without the oppression built into different kinds of philosophical suicide. In Camus' Myth of Sisyphus, he even ends it by drawing a direct parallel between man confronting the absence of divine authority, Sisyphus spiting the gods for their arbitrary cruelty by endlessly pushing his boulder, and workers under capitalism:
If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
Absurdist comedy is my favourite kind because it does the same thing. It's not "yuk yuk some people are different from other people" or "le epic random" or any other kind of arbitrary setup>punchline surface level joke. Absurdist comedy rejects the idea that there's an inherent idea of funny, that you should find things funny regardless of whatever context there is because your culture finds them funny or that comedy can be replicated by doing endless commodified versions of the same performance. Instead of saying "here's the setup" and "here's the punchline" in a generic standup routine, absurdists deconstruct comedy. They look at what makes something funny, they look at the composition and expectations of the audience, they look at the role and expectations of the comedian. They don't rehash the same dialectical relationships that moderate comedians do, but radically rebuild comedy to create some new idea and teach people some new way to think. Andy Kaufman did things that weren't funny because they subverted the audience's need for a comedic performance to be funny. At one point he showed up to David Letterman's show acting like his career just collapsed, his family left him, and he's at the bottom of a crippling depression. He then begs the audience for spare change until security removes him. The comedian is supposed to be a passive actor in a safe setting, he went to Tennessee and risked his life by becoming a professional wrestler and teaching southerners that toilet paper exists. He then made his wrestling character the first inter-gender wrestler so that his comedy was pretending he could beat any woman in the world just so that audience members would want to lynch him. Eric Andre took his unfunniest skit, obnoxious to the point that it's insufferable, and turned it into an entire episode to punish his audience for watching the show. His interviews are all about taking low tier celebrities who don't know who he is and finding elaborate ways to fuck with them. His skits are either nonsense or so deadpan and offensive that it's amazing he doesn't get shot by police.
Same reason modernism resonates with the left. My favourite ballets are ones like Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and Milhaud's La creation du monde which tried to create entirely new ways of experiencing that medium. Impressionism and post-impressionism are so beautiful to me because an artist like Van Gogh or Monet deconstructed what they were observing and reinvented its form and the physical laws governing it. Picasso was brilliant because he rejected a three-dimensional universe but still understood it enough to recreate it in an entirely new way. A reactionary would look at a Piet Mondrian or a Henri Rousseau or a Jackson Pollock and say it's degenerate nonsense, but our politics prime us to look at something and ask what its constituent parts are and how those interact and how those things could be changed to create some new synthesis.
edit: I'd also say that surrealist humour is still going to resonate with the left but to a lesser degree. With existentialism you're dealing with questions of individual rebellion, with absurdism that becomes systems theory, surrealism is closer to yuk-yuk because you're taking an established idea and tweaking its parameters a little bit so that there are a bunch of allusions. I like surrealism, I run r/fifthworldproblems which used to be the main surrealist subreddit before ones like r/surrealmemes, but I like it for the same reason I like reading a novel rather than for the same reason I like dialectical materialism. That subreddit never really attracted a political crowd despite both comedy and the website being deeply political, and even when I spun off r/fifthworldpolitics to satirise US politics there wasn't the same underlying creative drive to it that absurdist comedy has. You were just creating elaborate Ben Garrison parodies instead of challenging the ideas those people you were parodying represent or figuring out how some interdimensional spook thing would actually conceptualise politics. It never went more in this direction which I think would have had stronger creative legs.
Another note about Eric Andre that I really appreciate is how his show has evolved over its seasons as his popularity has grown. The more notoriety and name recognition he has, the more his interviewees are expecting to get fucked with. They sign up attempting to be in on the joke. So you see a natural progression through the seasons of Eric upping the absurdity in a sort of arms race between him and the guests. Complemented by an increase in budget over the show's run, it gets to some very complex places. The joke is no longer fucking with B-listers, but challenging them to expect the worst but still outdoing them.
That's where the creative strength of absurdism shines. When you understand your comedy mechanistically you can always find some new way to subvert a greater expectation. I think Conan O'brien and Craig Ferguson are talented performers with good writers but I don't think either could have that same arms race because they're too bound to the idea of what a late night talk show is supposed to be. There are material constraints like their need to have advertisements and attract new guests by letting them platform their product, there are social constraints like FCC and network censorship and audience demographics and cultural expectations for the late night talk show experience as people unwind in bed and don't want to think about the thing they're watching. Five seasons and Eric Andre has consistently impressed me as someone who's pedantic about this shit. Tim Heidecker has that same ability to be continually innovative way into his career and still pushing the boundaries of what can even be considered funny.
Great post. Thanks so much for the in depth analysis, and for fifthworldproblems!
Yes but can we talk about Bataille's feud with Breton and his claim that you can't do surrealist art or take influence from De Sade properly without having to eat shit yourself? Damn clout chasers
I mean you can't be a real socialist without theory and praxis, so...
I like bird up because it's complete nonsense on its own, like there's no structure or logic or aesthetic or punchline to it whatsoever, but becomes funny when that's used as a weapon. The skit on its own seemed like filler but then beating the audience with multiple competing layers of it for half an hour is hilarious.
Conservatives don’t really get jokes unless they’re on the nose, Ive noticed. The right can’t meme
yes, thinking the world is absurdly heinous helps with developing a sense of humor around how absurd it is. Thinking that the world is perfectly ordered & things are correct and good would stunt your ability to make absurdist humor
i was really fucking angry the whole day because there were only 5 deaths. watching the streams, i expected to see refrigerated trucks full of chud corpses leaving dc the next day.
but yes, the whole thing is hilarious and libs not finding it at least a bit funny goes to show you the state of ideological domination we live in. absolute super ego.
In that case, I really recommend the video the New Yorker released today, some top notch comedic moments
My favorite part was the police officer going "this is the most sacred place in this whole buildi-" and then he just sees the Q Shaman guy sitting in the big boy chair and does a huge exasperated sigh
"Ted Cruz was gonna sell us out all along! Look! Objection to counting the electoral vote of the state of Arizona. Wait, no that's actually a good thing. He's with us!"
I can't keep up with these plot twists.
If someone asks i only refer to YTPs as "media deconstruction"
Idk, I feel like it is more linked to an appreciation of metaphor overall. Sometimes you will notice that conservatives will interpret everything in a strictly literal sense (in addition to being wrong).
When we get into a discussion where we are trying to define 'humor', we get into trouble because it means so many things to so many different types of people.... But there's something uniquely pathetic about the conservative mind, especially in the way that it tries to process humor -- or more precisely what it thinks other people think humor is.
If anything i feel like my sense of humor has "narrowed" since I went from apolitical shitlib -> communist -- probably because I'm super cynical and angry all the time now lol. It's easier to not self-harm when you understand the sources of injustice in the world, but IMO, at the same time, it becomes harder to enjoy things
Well, recognizing the absurdity of our current world is something leftists have to deal with for sure.
Yeah with works like Society of the Spectacle and Marx's writings on Alienation it almost makes it easier to identify with disassociating then associating
Throw in Simulacra and Simulation and Capitalist Realism for good measure, which aim to demonstrate how absurdity is the natural outcome of the way capitalist societies structure our symbolic interactions, and how efforts to undermine that structuring only serve to reinforce its end stages.
On that read, perhaps one of the strongest sources of disassociation in absurdist humor is due to its ultimately defeatist project, acknowledging at once both the absurdity in the matter it aims to represent and the medium of its representation.
You should see Sorry to Bother You if you haven't already
You might be right but this whole thread is people jerking themselves off over how smart they are. :deng-smile:
When everything around you is broken beyond repair the only thing left to do is laugh about it.
Einstein was a socialist. All the big thinkers understand its not calvinist survival of the fittest bullshit. It's us and us. Working together that's how we fix it
idk but liberalism is a lot like the aesthetic of the tim and eric show now that I think about it.
:liberalism: :gun-shapiro:
Surrealist humor is nothing if not the perversion of conventional aesthetics.
I don't know but I love me some Eric Andre, Tim and Eric, and On Cinema (my personal favorite).
On Cinema and Decker are brilliant. I wish more people knew about them.
yo check out justin kuritzkes on youtube. He's known for "the potion seller" but he has a ton of amazing shit. His first upload, Dolores, is transcendental. Operation, Perfect World, and Dance All Night With My Wife are some other hits off the top o me head.
What appeals to me about absurdist humor is that it always, either consciously or not, works to cut through the thin veneer of art as pure consumption, and contains within it both a mocking critique of the capitalist mode of art production, and a confession that it itself belongs to this mode of production, and rightly mocks itself for it.
I guess there's also that a large part of the genre is the subversion of norms, the undermining of civility and 'rationality', and flirtation with taboo and excrementality. Leftist politics is precisely that: :PIGPOOPBALLS: QED
Sam Hyde is a good example of why absurdist comedy and right-wing philosophy don't mix. Even before I knew he was a Nazi and having grown up with 4chan/South Park, Million Dollar Extreme just felt like an accountant trying to parody Tim and Eric. Contrast this skit of a dumb reporter covering a story with a left-wing example in the same vein like Check It Out or Brass Eye. MDE has that same kind of comedic style and timing that SNL or a sitcom has, a right-winger has been given freedom from creative restraints and they're not a creative person so they take every joke they can think of and throw it into one messy scene which checks the boxes for what a skit should have. They mash together different kinds of humour incoherently and not once even with fresh eyes and thinking Blazing Saddles is Mel Brooks' best film did that skit make me chuckle. Check It Out and Brass Eye both have the same premise but the jokes aren't competing with each other in the same frame. There's a sense of rhythm and cohesion to the scenes even if they're subverting what we expect of those things. It's people that understand that rules are meant to be broken if you can build better rules out of the pieces, rather than someone like Sam Hyde who breaks rules as a crude contrarian but is too bound to comedic tradition to make new ones.
