When the Absurd Is All We've Got

And an absurd writing prompt

While I suppose it is true that every age has believed that absurdity was a regular presence and these times we live in possess no corner on the market, still it’s hard not to look around and wonder if we aren’t living with an abundance of ripe fruit of ridiculousness. Of course, one of the attributes of absurdity is that, like its cousins, irony and satire, it tends to reveal truth. This is certainly the case in literature. There is a whole body of absurdist literature that often includes books that have come to define whole eras, places, or ideologies. I’m thinking of writers like Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Joseph Heller, George Orwell, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Pynchon and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The last two generations have been importantly defined by the likes of Douglas Adams, Tom Robbins, Alexandra Kleeman, Chuck Palahniuk, Nora Ephron, Alissa Nutting, and José Saramago. Of late, I’ve been thinking nearly continuously about Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” for reasons obvious to most.

For me, I think the attempt to reveal truth must be at the center of any writer’s work, but I’m also a great believer that for some truths there is great value in the sneak attack that humor provides, and approaches like absurdism and satire offer vehicles to help us laugh our way to truth. It’s hard to take our eyes off the absurd. It’s kind of like the dream I had last night where I was trimming my beard, accidently shaved the bottom half inch directly above my chin off entirely, and then said, “Well, I guess I’d better make it uniform and continue the line across the width of my face and make my beard a statement piece.” Freud will have a heyday with that one. Now, if it weren’t a dream, the rationale person would decide to remove the entire beard. And if this were a waking event, I’d probably make my way to that decision, but not without first contemplating the absurdity of walking around with a kind of reverse trim job and trying to make myself believe it would all be all right for the interim while the infill grew. I mean, after all, the flip side of using absurdity, or comedy at all for that matter, to reveal truth, is that if we can’t laugh, we’d probably cry.

And that conveys how I feel most every day at present. If things weren’t so frequently absurd, I’d be lost only to despair. The absolute high point of last week for me was when news broke that the satirical news outlet The Onion had won a bankruptcy auction to purchase Infowars, the company owned by notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. While lawsuits have already been filed by Jones to block the sale, if it goes through, The Onion will own, among other items, his studio, his web domains, and his mailing lists—all the things that allowed Jones to spread his reprehensible lies so widely. As an NPR story notes, “Proceeds of any sale will go to paying down Jones' nearly $1.5 billion debt to families of Sandy Hook victims who won defamation suits against him in Connecticut and Texas, after he spread false conspiracy theories that the 2012 elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., never happened.” The Onion editors expressed the intent to turn the Infowars website against itself as a vehicle for satire, sort of the ultimate comedic revenge used to bring poetic justice to the families who lost children in the attack of Sandy Hook Elementary. If the presence of a figure like Alex Jones represents absurdism of the most vile, reprehensible sort of twisted vision of reality, The Onion has long represented the power of satire to call out truth through the lens of absurdity. And certainly, this example could offer teachers everywhere a wonderfully vivid lesson to define irony for students.

To label the hurtful, manipulative, fictional mailability Jones regularly used to exert his power of his followers in order to pursue an agenda so perverse it really can’t be fathomed feels disrespectful to the word absurd. Yet what else would you label the act of saying that an attack that killed twenty-six people never happened? When we increasingly live in a country where we can deny events that happened in real time, in full view of witnesses and recorded on phones and news cameras, when facts can be dismissed with two-word refrains of “fake news,” how else can you battle that kind of absurdity if not by turning it on itself? It’s one of the things literature is uniquely equipped to do well even in cultures where fewer and fewer people read books.

As I suggested, our era is not unique in the regular presence of extremely absurd events. And yet…and yet this week alone sure feels like it has provided some compelling evidence. Case in point. Netflix’s live streamed broadcast (glitches and all) of the fight between fifty-nine-year-old former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson and twenty-seven-year-old bro YouTube “influencer” Jake Paul would seem to define “absurd.” Both are absurdist figures. Tyson, he of ear-biting, face tattooing, multi-comeback extravaganza reputation, is one of the strangest, most complicated figures in American sports history. Paul, leads an army of disaffected youth aging into disaffected men simply by being an asshole and thumbing his nose at authority of any brand (all while hawking his own brand of body spray—sold exclusively at Walmart). Paul says that God spoke to him while he was tripping on hallucinogenic drugs and laid out a plan for him to save the world through expressing creativity through the violence of boxing. Tyson, who paraded backstage before the fight in a thong, said in an interview that his experiences with a hallucinogenic poison derived from frog venom played a role in his agreeing to the fight. Absurd? I’ll let you be the judge. Or is the greater absurdity that sixty-five million people tuned in?

Here's just a couple of other favorite headlines from the week:

·       “Timothée Chalamet crashes his own look-alike contest after police shut down crowded event.”

·       “Person dressed in a bear costume to fake attacks on cars for insurance payout, California officials say.”

·       “Poop on Pelosi's desk, a neo-Nazi tiki torch: Mysterious statues are popping up in D.C.”

Hold on to your unicorns, I think the world is about to get a whole lot weirder.

Writing Prompt

Last week I shared an absurd headline about escaped monkeys in South Carolina as a writing prompt. This week it’s your turn. Find a headline that strikes you particular funny/absurd/satirical bone; then use some line from it as a first line of a new story or poem.

And while we’re at it and it’s nearly Thanksgiving (and I’m thinking about escaped monkeys who hang out on the other side of the fence and taunt their brethren), if you don’t already know T.C. Boyle’s short story “Carnal Knowledge,” find it on the Internet (sadly, people have posted it as a pdf, denying yet another writer any royalties) or, better yet, go by his Collected Stories. “Carnal Knowledge is a short story about a guy, so desperate to prove his love to the woman of his dreams, that together they attempt to free a warehouse full of turkeys.

Have fun. Gobble gobble.

What I’m Listening To

You’ll probably recognize a theme.

What I’m Watching

I’m a blue-blooded superfan of Aaron Sorkin’s work. I’m fully cognizant this makes me hopelessly optimistic and idealistic, likely even self-deceptive. My experience is that people tend to love or hate Sorkin with little in between. We’ve been re-watching his 2012-14 series The Newsroom, which brings his rose-colored vision from The West Wing to cable news. I’m thoroughly enjoying the revisitation and Sorkin’s brilliant ability to mix workplace drama with comedy and an aspirational vision of democratic institutions with tragically flawed characters. But I’ve got to tell you, watching it in this moment is eerie and the backward view of the timeline for how news is delivered and how power is asserted demonstrates real prescience. So much of the dialogue could have been written about the 2024 election.

And I Can’t Pass This Up

I had vowed in my own head to be less overtly political this week, but I am writing about absurdity after all, so I just can’t pass up the impulse to post this photograph (not AI, by the way but officially released) and leave it at that:

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