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National Absurdity Day 2024

As a lifelong Monty Python fan, National Absurdity Day is right up my alley. I hope you take a moment to embrace the spirit of this ridiculous holiday.

The Privilege Of Absurdity

The privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only. ~Thomas Hobbes

It’s uncertain whether any other species is self-conscious enough to perceive the concept of absurdity.

Dogs and cats will shake off a silly costume, but that’s probably more due to the discomfort of wearing clothes than of any sense of embarrassment.

Monkeys and porpoises are well known for their sense of fun and apparent expressions of humor. Even so, do they recognize the absurdity of a situation?

Far be it from me to argue with a renowned philosopher like Thomas Hobbes, but I don’t think we can entirely rule it out.

In fact, it’s possible that the reason dogs seem to be smiling so often is because they consider our cares and worries absurd.

Wouldn’t we all be better off with a snack and getting our bellies scratched? Probably so.

National Absurdity Day

National Absurdity Day celebrated on this day: November 20th.

Absurdist art and thought were a reaction to the hyper-reality of centuries of grinding war. Games of empire, ethnic and national strife were the rule from time immemorial.

Thinking that at any moment, the lunatics running your country might decide to get into an explosive pissing match with the lunatics of another country gets a bit too real for some people.

It all becomes unbearably ridiculous.

One minute, you’re sitting there worrying about bills or crops or minding your kids and the next minute you’re in a muddy trench getting bombed and gassed.

Or maybe you’re getting drafted to fight Nazis, Imperial Japanese, North Koreans and Red Chinese or North Vietnamese and Viet Cong.

It’s more than a rational person can take, honestly.

What’s worse, if the president of a country we’ve been at odds with for over a century tells you that launching munitions into their territory will rise to the level of nuclear retaliation, it’s really fucking absurd for a senile, lame duck, halfwit, garbage president to green-light the use of said munitions in the last few days of his miserable failure of an administration.

That’s about as absurd as it gets.

It’s absurd that he became president in the first place, but it’s that much more absurd that he might get us into a world-ending nuclear war because he’s too much of a feckless puppet to mind his damn place and just mark time until January. You want to be consequential, asshole? Do something good. Provoking nuclear war is not good. Go eat your fucking ice cream and stop painting a target on everybody’s back.

Confuse-A-Cat ~ Monty Python’s Flying Circus (Closed captioned for the feline impaired)

When things get intense, it helps to watch something utterly absurd and have a laugh at it. Monty Python’s Flying Circus excelled at that.

I hope you enjoy these skits as much as I do.

Monty Python – Spanish Inquisition

Different Point Of View

It’s a wonderful narrative device to bring someone from the outside and look through his eyes if you want to describe the absurdity and preposterous reality that is accepted amongst the ones who are inside. ~Christoph Waltz

This is one of the charms of so-called “Portal Fiction”. The concept being that you take someone from an entirely separate setting and mindframe and drop them into an entirely different society.

From Wonderland, Narnia, Oz and King Arthur’s Court to the dystopian absurdity of Idiocracy, many books have been written on this premise.

You take someone from what we consider normal circumstances and drop them someplace they have absolutely no business being.

Some examples are Alice, Wendy Darling and her brothers, the Pevensie siblings, Dorothy Gale, Hank Morgan, Joe Bauers and even Lemuel Gulliver.

The main character brings a relatable, common sense perspective to the fantastical environment into which they are thrust.

The more they try to behave normally, the more absurd their respective places seem.

As much as any of them try to adapt and fit in, the more the absolute absurdity overtakes their ability to do so.

How can an otherwise rational and normal person deal with rabbits in waistcoats and teleporting cats, flying monkeys and talking trees, immortal boys and a crocodile that tick-tocks, a swashbuckling mouse and a Jesus-Lion, the Knights of the Round Table or mentally impaired people pouring Brawndo on their crops because it has electrolytes?

It’s all quite absurd, but the characters have no apparent escape. Not knowing how they got roped into this insanity, the best they can do is try to cope.

So say we all. No matter how absurd life becomes, we do our best to wrestle matters into some semblance of normalcy and muddle through.

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That’s all for now. Go do something absurd to lighten your week.