How does one write for absurdity?  After all, what is the absurd. The unexpectedly humourous. The weird confluence of ideas, people, situations and object that don’t normally belong together? Or more than that, shouldn’t belong together.  Things that clash in their purpose. How does one pull from a rational brain ideas that align with the notion of absurdity, might be the bigger and more important question?

An example might help.

That is to say, here I’m sitting at a Starbucks and writing out on the patio. Nothing about that situation is absurd. In fact it is quite mundane. Coffee. Patio table. Sunshine. People gathered and enjoying their drinks. Me with a keyboard.  That is a situation that is in itself complete mundane.

What would make this situation absurd?  How many elements of it would need to change to create a humourous contrast. Changing something might make it just silly or funny, say. For example, a cafe like this where the barista is a dog is silly. Or  maybe patio where there were preposterously small tables might lean towards the absurd, but it is mostly again just silly and impractical.

I think there is an aspect of the absurd where the end result of the situation is, yes, important, but also the logic behind how we got to that point that makes it go beyond the silly and drift more into absurdity.  Cause and effect. We see the effect and then are captivated by the odd sort of logic that brought us there.

So again, back to the silly examples. A barista who is a dog is silly. A barista who is a dog because the dog isn’t really a dog but a shapeshifting robot who is stuck in the form of a dog is kind of strange. A shapeshifting robot barista stuck in the form of a dog because a software update sent out from a megacorporation who misread and misinterpretted a sarcastic customer review and decided by committee that what all customers wanted was baristas who looked liked dogs—that is starting to become absurd.  It’s baked into the explanation.  

Likewise, a cafe patio with small tables is akward, but if those tables are small because of some middling store manager who beleives that small tables are fashionable and kind of trendy, that’s silly. If the manager is also bad at math and then orders tables that are ridiculously small, to the point that they are essentially barely wide enough to hold a single cup of coffee balanced on the end of a thin table leg and that he has ordered these at great expense and unmasked embarassment but cannot get rid of them because he would need to admit his error, risk losing his job and thinks he would look a worse fool than he already does, so everyone is forced to pretend and justify that these useless tables are deliberate and great—that starts to get absurd.

Absurdity is an elusive thing, I think.  One of my great role models, Douglas Adams was seemingly great at the absurd, but one immediately assumes that his greatest examples of absurdity were accidents or rolled effortlessly onto the page. In fact, one can kind of tell that he was building absurdity into his everyday experience, picking out weirdness from the mundane by just asking “what if—“

What if this was slightly and weirdly different, why would that have happened, and what if people tried to pretend it was a completely normal thing to have happened?