Two streams meet here. The older one is comic. Jonathan Swift proposed in 1729 that the Irish poor sell their children as food, in perfect deadpan. Laurence Sterne wrote a novel whose narrator cannot get himself born for three volumes. Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat diagnosed the whole county as mad. Ambrose Bierce defined every noble word as a fraud, then walked into the Mexican revolution in 1913 and was never seen again.
The younger stream is philosophical. Kierkegaard named “the absurd” in 1843 as the thing faith must leap over. In 1942 Albert Camus, a twenty-nine-year-old from working-class Algiers, published a novel and an essay in the same year that defined it without the leap: the absurd is the gap between our hunger for meaning and a universe that offers none, and the only honest response is to live anyway, eyes open. The essay ends by asking us to imagine Sisyphus happy.
The absurd is a relationship. It is not in the world and not in us, but in the collision: a mind that demands meaning meeting a universe that stays silent.
Three ways out, two of them cheating. Suicide ends the collision by ending the mind. The leap of faith ends it by inventing an answer; Camus called that philosophical suicide. Revolt keeps the collision alive and lives inside it.
Lucidity is the virtue. Hope is the temptation. See the gap clearly and do not look away.
Quantity over purpose. With no single meaning on offer, the measure of a life is how much of it you were awake for.
Laughing is revolt too. The satirists knew it first. The joke that exposes the gap is a way of refusing to pretend it is not there.
The absurd was noticed long before it was named, and not only in Europe. Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly and woke unable to say which of them was dreaming. The Nasreddin Hodja tales of thirteenth-century Anatolia, still told from Bosnia to China, have him searching for his lost key under the streetlight because the light is better there. Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary” (1918) is Kafka’s exact contemporary. Camus himself was Algerian-born, and his Arab Algerians have no names, a silence the Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud answered in 2013.
Women are the thin spot here, and we would rather say so than stretch. Dorothy Parker belongs by temperament, and she is still in copyright.
Absurdism is Existentialism’s sibling, separated in 1952; the border is whether meaning can be made (Sartre) or only faced (Camus). It shares the Stoic acceptance of what cannot be changed and rejects the Stoic serenity in favour of revolt. It is Cynic mockery given a philosophy, and it is often set beside Zen, on the Eastern page, where the koan also breaks the mind’s demand for sense.
Sisyphus, happy, on a thousand posters. Absurdist humour from Monty Python to the meme. Every office comedy about pointless work is The Myth of Sisyphus with a photocopier.