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Surreal humour
Surreal humour
Surreal humour
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The style of humour of the comedy act The Mighty Boosh is often described as surreal.[1][2][3][4][5]
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Surreal humour (also called surreal comedy, absurdist humour, or absurdist comedy) is a form of humour predicated on deliberate violations of causal reasoning, thus producing events and behaviours that are obviously illogical. Portrayals of surreal humour tend to involve bizarre juxtapositions, incongruity, non-sequiturs, irrational or absurd situations, and expressions of nonsense.[6]

Surreal humour grew out of surrealism, a cultural movement developed in the 20th century by French and Belgian artists, who depicted unnerving and illogical scenes while developing techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself.[6] The movement itself was foreshadowed by English writers in the 19th century, most notably Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. The humour in surreal comedy arises from a subversion of audience expectations, emphasising the ridiculousness and unlikeliness of a situation, so that amusement is founded on an unpredictability that is separate from a logical analysis of the situation.

Surreal humour is concerned with building up expectations and then knocking them down; even seemingly masterful characters with the highest standards and expectations are subverted by the unexpected, which the scene emphasises for the viewer's amusement. Either the "goofball" or "straight" character in the scene can react with dull surprise, disdain, boredom, or detached interest, thus heightening comic tension. Characters' intentions are set up in a series of scenes significantly different from what the audience might ordinarily encounter in daily life. The unique social situations, expressed thoughts, actions, and comic lines are used to spark laughter, emotion, or surprise as to how the events occurred or unfolded, in ways sometimes favourable to other unexpectedly introduced characters.[citation needed]

Surreal humour in theatre is usually about the insensitivity, paradox, absurdity, and cruelty of the modern world.[citation needed] Absurd and surrealist cinema often deals with elements of dark humour, disturbing or sinister subjects like death, disease, or warfare are treated with amusement and bitterness, creating the appearance of an intention to shock and offend.[citation needed]

Literary precursors

[edit]
Edward Lear's 1885 lithograph Edward Lear, Aged 73 and a Half, and His Cat Foss, Aged 16

Surreal humour is the effect of the illogical and absurd being used for humorous effect. Under such premises, people can identify precursors and early examples of surreal humour at least since the 19th century, such as in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, both of which use the illogical and absurd (hookah-smoking caterpillars, croquet matches using live flamingos as mallets, etc.) for humorous effect. Many of Edward Lear's children's stories and poems contain nonsense and are basically surreal in approach. For example, The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World (1871) is filled with contradictory statements and odd images intended to provoke amusement, such as the following:

After a time they saw some land at a distance; and when they came to it, they found it was an island made of water quite surrounded by earth. Besides that, it was bordered by evanescent isthmuses with a great Gulf-stream running about all over it, so that it was perfectly beautiful, and contained only a single tree, 503 feet high.[7]

Relationship with dadaism and futurism

[edit]
Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917), an inverted urinal signed "R. Mutt".

In the early 20th century, several avant-garde movements, including the dadaists, surrealists, and futurists began to argue for an art that was random, jarring and illogical.[8] The goals of these movements were in some sense serious, and they were committed to undermining the solemnity and self-satisfaction of the contemporary artistic establishment of the time. As a result, much of their art was intentionally amusing.

One example is Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917), an inverted urinal signed "R. Mutt". This became one of the most famous and influential pieces of art in history, and one of the earliest examples of the found object movement. It is also a joke, relying on the inversion of the item's function as expressed by its title as well as its incongruous presence in an art exhibition.[9]

Etymology and development

[edit]

The word surreal first began to be used to describe a type of aesthetic of the early 1920s.

Surreal humour is also found frequently in avant-garde theatre such as Waiting for Godot and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. In the United States, S. J. Perelman (1904–1979) has been identified as the first surrealist humour writer.[10]

Surrealist humour appeared on British radio from 1951 to 1960 by the cast of The Goon Show: Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, and Harry Secombe.[11][12]: 37  The Goons' work influenced the American radio comedy troupe the Firesign Theatre (1966–2012).[13][14] The Firesigns wrote sophisticated comic radio plays, many of which were recorded on albums.

Surrealist humour is predominantly approached in cinema where the suspension of disbelief can be stretched to absurd lengths by logically following the consequences of unlikely, reversed or exaggerated premises. Luis Buñuel is a principal exponent of this, especially in The Exterminating Angel. It is a prominent feature in the television and cinematic work of the British comedy troupe Monty Python (1969–2014). Other examples include The Falls by Peter Greenaway and Brazil by Terry Gilliam.[15][16]

Surrealist humour in the United States Of America, has become increasingly popular in both children- and adult-oriented American animation, particularly with Cartoon Network and with Nickelodeon, and its adult oriented programming block Adult Swim and FOX, and most notably in American animated shows such as Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Drawn Together, The Amazing World of Gumball, The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad!, Regular Show, South Park, Ren and Stimpy, SpongeBob SquarePants, Adventure Time, Rick and Morty, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and more recently, Smiling Friends.

Contemporary Internet meme culture, such as Weird Twitter, Skibidi Toilet, and YouTube poop, is also influenced by surreal humour.[17]

Analysis

[edit]

Mary K. Rodgers and Diana Pien analysed the subject in an essay titled "Elephants and Marshmallows" (subtitled "A Theoretical Synthesis of Incongruity-Resolution and Arousal Theories of humour"), and wrote that "jokes are nonsensical when they fail to completely resolve incongruities," and cited one of the many permutations of the elephant joke: "Why did the elephant sit on the marshmallow?" "Because he didn't want to fall into the cup of hot chocolate."[18]

"The joke is incompletely resolved in their opinion," noted Elliott Oring, "because the situation is incompatible with the world as we know it. Certainly, elephants do not sit in cups of hot chocolate."[19] Oring defined humour as not the resolution of incongruity, but "the perception of appropriate incongruity,"[20] that all jokes contain a certain amount of incongruity, and that absurd jokes require the additional component of an "absurd image," with an incongruity of the mental image.[21]

See also

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References

[edit]
Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia

Surreal humour

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Surreal humour, also known as absurdist humour, is a comedic style predicated on the deliberate violation of and logical expectations, resulting in bizarre, dream-like scenarios that provoke laughter through and the irrational. This form of subverts conventional reality by juxtaposing unrelated elements, often drawing from the to create unexpected associations and playful distortions. Rooted in Freudian theories of repression and the pleasure derived from , it serves as a release, blending whimsy with elements of black humour, grotesquerie, and irony. Emerging in the early as a core element of the movement, surreal humour traces its origins to the post-World War I , which rejected amid societal disillusionment. formalized in his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism, defining it as "psychic automatism" that liberates thought from rational control, with humour acting as a revolutionary tool against bourgeois norms and logic. Influenced by Freud's ideas on the unconscious and childhood play, surrealists employed techniques like and chance juxtapositions—such as Lautréamont's famous and encounter—to generate pseudometaphors that defy semantic hierarchy. In , this manifested as black humour parodying social conventions, with playwrights like Roger Vitrac using situations and to express melancholy and . himself described humour as a "" fired at reason, promoting a moral attitude of mental revolt against suffering. Key characteristics include the absurd combination of thoughts or images, often evoking dépaysement (displacement) to unsettle viewers and liberate the imagination. A common verbal expression of surreal humour is the "surreal joke," which deliberately violates logic through non-sequiturs and incongruous juxtapositions, such as the classic "How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb? Fish." or the elaborate variation "How many surreal artists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Three, one to hold the giraffe, and one to put the clocks in the bath tub." In , Max Ernst's collages, such as (1921), exemplify this through hybrid figures blending humans, animals, and machines in illogical scenes. Literary examples abound in Breton's poetry, like L'Union libre (1931), where metaphors equate body parts to childlike scrawls, embracing euphoric anarchy. Salvador Dalí's (1936) further illustrates the form's tactile absurdity, merging functional objects into erotic, irrational wholes. Surreal humour persists in contemporary media, adapting its disruptive essence to film and animation for broad appeal. In Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010), the Mad Hatter's eccentric riddles and the Red Queen's tyrannical whimsy subvert narrative logic, echoing Surrealist dépaysement while grossing over $1 billion worldwide. Similarly, Toy Story 3 (2010) employs absurd toy peril—such as aliens wielding a claw in a landfill escape—to blend childhood fantasy with existential threat, demonstrating surreal humour's commercial viability. These instances highlight how the style continues to challenge perceptions, fostering a sense of wonder amid chaos.

Origins and Historical Development

Literary Precursors

The roots of surreal humour in literature can be traced to 19th-century nonsense traditions, which subverted rational structures through illogical juxtapositions, dream-like sequences, and linguistic play, laying groundwork for later surrealist explorations of the irrational. These works challenged Victorian-era emphasis on logic and propriety, creating self-contained worlds of that anticipated surrealism's embrace of the and the bizarre. Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) exemplifies proto-surreal elements through its nonsensical logic and dream sequences, where Alice navigates a fantastical realm defying physical and temporal rules. The Mad Hatter's tea party, for instance, features a watch that "tells the day of the month, and doesn’t tell what o’clock it is!", highlighting time's arbitrary distortion and wordplay that undermines causality. André Breton, a key surrealist figure, recognized this as inherently surreal, stating that "Carroll is surrealist in nonsense." Such sequences influenced American surrealist literary experiments in the 1920s and 1930s, fostering a fantastic mode that blended dream logic with cultural critique. Edgar Allan Poe's gothic tales, particularly The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), prefigured surreal humour via irrational psychological states and bizarre imagery that blurred reality and . The narrator describes Roderick Usher's painting of a vault flooded with "ghastly rays" from an undefined source, evoking a trance-like abstraction that mirrors the character's mental decay and the house's sentient collapse. This fusion of inner turmoil with external grotesquerie inspired surrealists like , who adapted Poe's motifs of obsession and the uncanny into works exploring Freudian depths, such as monomaniacal fixations in Berenice. Edward Lear's A Book of Nonsense (1846) advanced these precursors through limericks and emphasizing playful and linguistic distortion, often parodying social norms with eccentric characters and inverted logic. In one limerick, "There was an Old Man of Vesuvius, / Who studied the works of ; / When the flames burnt his book, / To drinking he took, / That morbid Old Man of Vesuvius!", the volcanic eruption destroys his scholarly work, prompting a turn to alcohol in a morbidly humorous of expected rigor. Lear's techniques, including neologisms like "" and visual-textual incongruities (e.g., an "Old Man of Coblenz" with comically immense legs), created arbitrary universes that defied coherence, anticipating surrealism's hybrids and norm-subverting humor. Overall, 19th-century nonsense literature's emphasis on incongruity—such as non-sequiturs, Poe's hallucinatory vaults, and eccentric "Old Persons"—disrupted linear rationality, fostering a legacy of illogical juxtapositions that surrealists later formalized. These elements transitioned into 20th-century movements, amplifying their disruptive potential.

Avant-Garde Influences

Dadaism, emerging as a radical response to the horrors of , profoundly shaped surreal humour by championing anti-rational chaos and nonsensical expression as forms of protest against bourgeois logic and militarism. Founded in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland, by artists including , Emmy Hennings, and , the movement rejected traditional art forms in favor of performative absurdity that mocked societal norms. Tzara, a Romanian-born poet and performer, became a central figure through his chaotic cabaret shows, where he recited manifestos denouncing art's complicity in rational systems that fueled the war. His 1918 proclaimed an anti-art ethos, declaring "Dada means nothing" to underscore the futility of meaning in a senseless world, while his cut-up poetry method—in which words from newspapers were randomly rearranged—exemplified the embrace of chance over intentionality, influencing later for generating humorous incongruities. Similarly, Italian Futurism contributed to surreal humour's fascination with disruptive energy and machine-like irrationality, predating Dada by emphasizing velocity and violence as antidotes to cultural stagnation. In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the Futurist Manifesto in the French newspaper Le Figaro, glorifying "the beauty of speed" and the "multiplied uproar of a battle" to celebrate industrial modernity while scorning museums and libraries as graves of the past. This manifesto, with its bombastic calls for destruction and renewal, infused Futurist works with an absurd, aggressive vitality that surrealists later adapted into playful yet subversive humor. Marinetti's 1914 sound poem Zang Tumb Tumb, a typographic explosion depicting the Battle of Adrianople through onomatopoeic fragments like gunfire and machinery, captured the chaotic rhythm of the machine age, blending violence with linguistic frenzy to evoke the era's disorienting absurdity. At the Cabaret Voltaire, Dadaists staged nonsensical skits and performances that directly protested the war's rational justifications, fostering an atmosphere of deliberate irrationality that surrealists would formalize as humorous rebellion. Hugo Ball's recitations of phonetic poems, such as "gadji beri bimba," delivered in cubic costumes amid improvised music and African-inspired chants, created immersive spectacles of sonic chaos intended to dismantle language's logical structure. These events, attended by war resisters in neutral , influenced surrealists like , who adopted Dada's anti-rational stance to explore the unconscious through humorously illogical forms, viewing absurdity as a weapon against conformity. A key technique emerging from , building on Dada's embrace of chance, was the game, a collaborative method of invented in 1925 to produce unexpected, humorous compositions. Participants folded paper to contribute blindly to a or poem, resulting in hybrid figures like a creature with mismatched limbs, as seen in Surrealist experiments where artists such as Hans Arp generated surreal amalgamations to mock coherent representation. This game's emphasis on chance and collective irrationality directly informed surreal humour's delight in the bizarre and unforeseen, transforming political into enduring artistic play.

Etymology and Emergence in Surrealism

The term "surrealiste" was first coined by French poet and playwright in the preface to his 1917 play , where he employed it to denote a dramatic form exceeding conventional realism through elements of fantasy, , and heightened sensory experience, evolving from notions of "superreal" to capture an intensified, dream-like reality. This usage marked an early shift toward embracing the irrational and the comical in art, as the play's plot involves grotesque and whimsical transformations, such as a character's breasts inflating into balloons, satirizing societal norms through illogical scenarios. André Breton formalized and expanded this concept in his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, defining Surrealism as "psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought" free from rational control, aesthetic, or moral constraints, thereby integrating dream-inspired absurdity and humor as pathways to the unconscious. Breton's text emphasized the resolution of dream and reality into a higher "surreality," where humorous incongruities—such as unexpected associations from automatic writing—served to liberate thought from bourgeois rationality. In the 1920s, Surrealism emerged prominently through Paris-based gatherings of artists and writers, including the establishment of the Bureau of Surrealist Research on October 11, 1924, at 15 rue de Grenelle, which facilitated collaborative experiments in automatic techniques and discussions on revolutionary ideas. These sessions, influenced briefly by Dadaism's anarchic irreverence, evolved into the publication of La Révolution surréaliste journal starting in December 1924, featuring satirical and absurd content like dream accounts, anti-religious tracts, and provocations such as "Is Suicide a Solution?" to mock bourgeois conventions and promote subversive humor. By the 1930s, Surrealist humor extended from literary experiments into and , with automatic and yielding comical juxtapositions, as seen in Joan Miró's organic, playful forms in works like (1928). Salvador Dalí's early writings, such as his 1930 contributions to surrealist periodicals exploring paranoid-critical methods, infused dream logic with whimsical, grotesque imagery—exemplifying humorous manifestations like melting clocks in his accompanying visuals—to challenge perceptual norms. This expansion culminated in films like (1929), co-scripted by Dalí and , where absurd sequences, such as an eye sliced by a , blended shock with irreverent comedy to evoke the unconscious.

Core Characteristics

Defining Elements

Surreal humour is characterized by its deliberate violation of logical and conventional expectations, drawing from the principles of to create comedic effects through the irrational and the unexpected. At its core, this form of humour relies on techniques that prioritize the and the marvelous over rational coherence, as established in the foundational texts of the movement. These elements emerged within as a means to explore the boundaries of thought and expression, fostering through the disruption of everyday norms. A primary technique is the of incongruous elements, where disparate or unrelated objects, ideas, or realities are combined to produce a startling, humorous incongruity. This method, often described as the "fortuitous encounter" of distant realities, generates by clashing the familiar with the bizarre, such as the meeting of a and an on a dissecting table, evoking a of the nonsensical that undermines perceptual logic. In humorous contexts, this juxtaposition subverts audience expectations, creating a comedic tension resolved through recognition of the impossible harmony. Automatism complements this by enabling the spontaneous generation of such scenarios; defined as "psychic automatism in its pure state," it involves unfiltered expression dictated by thought without rational control, allowing absurd ideas to surface freely and form the basis of illogical humor. Illogical narrative structures further define surreal humour, employing non-sequiturs, dream logic, and the of expectations to mimic the disjointed flow of thought. Non-sequiturs disrupt sequential reasoning with abrupt, unrelated shifts, while dream logic follows associative rather than causal patterns, turning everyday events into chains of improbable connections that elicit amusement through their defiance of . This includes comedic adaptations of Freudian slips, where unintended verbal revelations expose repressed desires in a lighthearted, exaggerated manner, heightening the humour via unexpected psychological insight. These structures prioritize intellectual engagement over linear storytelling, ensuring the comedy arises from rather than predictable progression. The mechanisms of surreal humour stem from absurdity derived from violated social and logical norms, often amplified by the and black humour. Absurdity functions by presenting scenarios that render conventional rules meaningless, provoking laughter at the sheer improbability of the situation. The contributes by blending the familiar with the strange, creating an eerie yet comic unease—termed unheimlich—that arises when repressed elements resurface in distorted forms, turning discomfort into humorous revelation. Black humour, in surreal contexts, integrates morbid or subjects with ironic detachment, using the irrational to critique societal hypocrisies without direct confrontation, as seen in the movement's emphasis on "objective humour" that fuses personal caprice with external accidents. Unlike , which relies on physical exaggeration and bodily harm for comedic effect, surreal humour is predominantly , engaging the mind through conceptual disruption rather than visual or kinetic action. This distinction underscores its focus on exploration and subversive , avoiding the immediate, sensory appeal of in favor of lingering cognitive surprise.

Psychological and Philosophical Underpinnings

Surreal humor draws heavily from Freudian psychoanalysis, particularly through André Breton's adaptation in the Surrealist Manifesto, where the unconscious mind serves as a primary source of creative liberation. Breton, influenced by Sigmund Freud's theories, emphasized the role of the unconscious as a repository of repressed thoughts, desires, and id-driven impulses that manifest in absurd, dream-like scenarios to achieve wish-fulfillment. In this framework, surreal humor allows for the expression of primal instincts otherwise suppressed by societal norms, transforming potentially disturbing content into playful absurdity. Philosophically, surreal humor challenges Enlightenment-era by embracing as a path to existential liberation, echoing Albert Camus's concept of the absurd. Camus viewed the absurd as the tension between humanity's search for meaning and the universe's indifference, proposing revolt through scornful acceptance rather than denial. Surrealists extended this by using humor to subvert logical structures, critiquing the repressive order of modern society and promoting the irrational as a means of psychological and ideological freedom. This approach positions humor not as mere entertainment but as a tool for confronting and transcending rational constraints. From a cognitive perspective, surreal humor generates by disrupting established mental schemas and inducing , aligning with incongruity theory in . This theory posits that amusement arises when expected patterns are violated in a resolvable yet surprising manner, leading to a sudden shift in . Modern studies on humor, including those examining absurd and surreal forms, show that such disruptions activate brain regions associated with , fostering a release through the reconciliation of incongruous elements. In surreal contexts, this manifests as bizarre juxtapositions that highlight the fragility of rational thought, enhancing comedic effect while revealing deeper psychological tensions. Central to these underpinnings is Surrealism's core aim, as articulated by Breton, to reconcile the contradictory realms of dream and into a "surreality" that yields humorous . By prioritizing over logic, surreal humor critiques societal repression, allowing individuals to access unconscious desires and achieve emotional release from everyday constraints. This process not only liberates the mind but also underscores the movement's belief in the unconscious as a superior , where serves as both artistic method and philosophical .

Manifestations Across Media

In Literature and Writing

Surreal humour in literature found its roots in the Surrealist movement of the 1920s, where writers sought to liberate the unconscious through , dream-infused narratives that subverted logical coherence to elicit unexpected laughter. André Breton's Nadja (1928), a seminal surrealist text, blends autobiographical encounters with hallucinatory dream sequences, creating an that humorously defies conventional by treating chance meetings and reveries as profound revelations. Similarly, Louis Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris (1926) employs hallucinatory descriptions of Parisian arcades and modern life, transforming mundane urban landscapes into bizarre, poetic spectacles that mock bourgeois reality through exaggerated, illogical imagery. In the post-surrealist period, surreal humour evolved into existential and magical realist forms, extending its critique of rationality into broader literary traditions. Samuel Beckett's (1953), a cornerstone of the Theatre of the Absurd, integrates surrealist influences through repetitive, nonsensical dialogue and futile waiting, generating dark humour from the characters' absurd predicament that underscores human isolation. Gabriel García Márquez's magical realism, as seen in works like (1967), overlaps with surreal humour by depicting fantastical events—such as raining flowers or ascending ascents—in a deadpan tone, humorously blurring the line between the real and the impossible to satirize historical and social absurdities. Key techniques in surreal literary humour include stream-of-consciousness narration, genre parody, and linguistic experimentation, which disrupt expected patterns to reveal the ridiculousness of everyday logic. James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939) exemplifies linguistic surrealism through its dense portmanteau words and multilingual puns, producing a humorous polyphony that parodies language itself and invites readers to revel in interpretive chaos. These methods persisted into postmodern literature, where surreal humour in short stories and poetry—such as in the black humour of surrealist poets like Joyce Mansour—employs non-sequiturs and ironic twists to critique societal illusions, evolving from pure automatism to a more self-aware mockery of reality.

In Visual Arts and Performance

Surreal humour in visual arts often manifests through the juxtaposition of incongruous elements that subvert expectations of reality, creating a sense of playful yet disorienting absurdity. Salvador Dalí's The Persistence of Memory (1931), featuring limp, melting pocket watches draped over a barren landscape, exemplifies this by rendering time malleable and nonsensical, akin to "the camembert of time and soft watches," which evokes a humorous undermining of temporal logic through precise, dreamlike depiction. Similarly, Man Ray's readymades and photomontages, such as Gift (1921)—an iron studded with nails—blend everyday objects into configurations that provoke humorous irony and unease, challenging conventional notions of utility and aesthetics within the Surrealist tradition. In performance, Surreal humour extends to live enactments that disrupt normative structures, drawing from avant-garde precursors like spectacles. Guillaume Apollinaire's play (1917), a foundational Surrealist , employs gender-bending—where the protagonist's breasts detach and float away amid chaotic, anti-realist staging—to satirize societal conventions and procreation through absurd, liberating . Later, Allan Kaprow's in the 1960s, such as 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959), evolved this legacy into participatory events blending scripted chaos with audience involvement, fostering irrational, humorous encounters that blurred art and life in ephemeral, site-specific . Central to these expressions are concepts like parody of classical art forms, where Surrealists mock rigid traditions through exaggerated distortions, as seen in Dalí's ironic precision mimicking techniques to amplify the bizarre. Optical illusions contribute comedic effect by deceiving perception, such as in Salvador Dalí's double-image landscapes that reveal hidden forms, prompting amused double-takes on reality's fragility. Interactive installations further provoke irrational responses, inviting viewers to engage with absurd objects—like fur-covered teacups by Meret Oppenheim—that elicit humorous discomfort through tactile surprise, emphasizing Surrealism's aim to liberate the unconscious. A pivotal event showcasing these elements was the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in , organized by , where attendees navigated dimly lit galleries under umbrellas amid , encountering absurd displays including Salvador Dalí's —a functional phone topped with a symbolizing erotic unease and phallic humor. This installation, first modeled in 1936 but prominently featured here, exemplified Surreal humour's fusion of the mundane and monstrous to jolt viewers into subconscious laughter and revelation.

In Film, Television, and Comedy

Surreal humour in film emerged prominently through early experimental works that defied conventional narrative structures, embracing dream-like sequences and shocking imagery to evoke the irrational. Luis Buñuel's (1929), co-written with , exemplifies this with its infamous eye-slicing scene and non-linear progression of hallucinatory events, serving as an iconic statement of by sabotaging traditional cinematic logic. Similarly, Jean Cocteau's (1930) explores the artist's psyche through metaphorical and fantastical vignettes, blending classical aesthetics with surrealist motifs to probe the boundaries between reality and imagination. In television, surreal humour found a broader audience via that amplified absurdity through rapid incongruities and illogical scenarios. Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969–1974), created by the British troupe including , featured sketches like "The Ministry of Silly Walks," where bureaucratic normalcy escalates into grotesque physical parody, embodying a surreal approach that meticulously built absurd frameworks. This style persisted in later shows such as (2004–2007), where protagonists Howard Moon and Vince Noir navigate fantastical realms filled with anthropomorphic creatures and nonsensical quests, marking it as the epitome of surrealist comedy through its genre-blending whimsy. More recently, as of 2024, What We Do in the Shadows (2019–2024) continues this tradition with depictions of vampires in absurd, everyday predicaments, blending delivery with escalating irrationality to satirize modern life. Stand-up comedy incorporated surreal techniques by riffing on everyday reality through escalating implausibility and meta-commentary. Comedian employs rapid narrative loops that distort mundane observations into increasingly bizarre hypotheticals, creating a taut, self-referential that dissects expectations. Techniques like these highlight surreal humour's reliance on incongruity to subvert scripted or spoken scenarios, transforming routine setups into dream-logic explorations. Surreal jokes represent a concise verbal manifestation of surreal humour in comedy. Surreal jokes are a form of absurdist or surreal humor that deliberately violate logic, causality, and expectations to create bizarre, illogical, and often nonsensical scenarios for comedic effect. They feature incongruous juxtapositions, non-sequiturs, and dream-like absurdity, originating from the surrealist art movement. Examples include:
  • How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb? Fish.
  • How many surreal artists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Three, one to hold the giraffe, and one to put the clocks in the bath tub.
  • What did Salvador Dalí have for breakfast? Surreal.
Animation within these media further amplified surrealism, particularly through Gilliam's cut-out style in Monty Python's Flying Circus, which fused Victorian illustrations with chaotic photomontage to produce a dreamlike, disorienting visual humour that blurred historical and fantastical elements. In the 21st century, digital effects expanded these possibilities, as seen in Being John Malkovich (1999), directed by Spike Jonze from Charlie Kaufman's script, where a portal into an actor's mind unleashes a cascade of identity-swapping absurdities, demanding rediscovery of its unpredictable surrealist comedy. In film, Ari Aster's Beau Is Afraid (2023) exemplifies contemporary surreal humour through its epic, nightmarish journey of paranoia and maternal dread, featuring grotesque hallucinations and illogical escalations that provoke uneasy laughter amid psychological chaos.

Cultural Impact and Evolution

Influence on Modern Culture

Surreal humour has permeated modern , particularly through and , where its dream-like and absurd elements challenge conventional narratives to engage audiences. In the and , Absolut Vodka's campaigns exemplified this integration, featuring witty, artistic visuals that blurred the lines between commercial promotion and surreal art, such as pun-laden imagery of the bottle in fantastical scenarios. Similarly, video games like (2004) employed absurd mechanics—such as rolling everyday objects into massive balls—to create a surreal, hilarious experience that satirized accumulation and scale in playful ways. The rise of digital platforms has accelerated surreal humour's evolution into internet memes, fostering viral content that thrives on platforms like and . Subreddits dedicated to surreal memes, such as r/surrealmemes, curate bizarre, disorienting images and captions that parody reality, while TikTok tags like #surrealmemes amplify chaotic, animated absurdities drawing from early 2000s internet relics. Even established formats like the "Distracted Boyfriend" meme have spawned surreal variants, incorporating dream-like distortions or impossible scenarios to heighten their commentary on distraction in a hyper-connected world. Globally, surreal humour has adapted to diverse cultural contexts, blending with local storytelling traditions to explore absurdity. In Japanese anime, FLCL (2000) weaves surreal elements—like hyperactive aliens and metaphorical robot battles—into a coming-of-age narrative laced with silly wordplay and chaotic energy. These manifestations underscore surreal humour's role in contemporary society as a tool for navigating modernity's chaos, offering emotional relief through while critiquing . By transforming overwhelming realities into laughable distortions, it serves as an adaptive mechanism, reducing perceived stress and fostering resilience amid uncertainty. Works employing surreal humour often lampoon excess, as seen in artistic critiques that equate material obsession with ritualistic folly. Post-2000s, has driven its resurgence, with millennial and Gen Z content mirroring timelines of inanity and through bizarre montages and ironic detachment. More recently, as of 2023, series like The Curse have employed a surreal sense of humor in their idiosyncratic narratives, blending discomfort and to satirize modern life.

Notable Examples and Practitioners

André Breton, the principal theorist of , advanced surreal humour through his 1940 Anthology of Black Humour, a collection that positioned the form as a "superior revolt of the mind" against rational norms, drawing on Freudian psychoanalysis to subvert societal conventions via irony, , and the . Breton's selections, including works by , the , and contemporaries like , exemplified humour's role in liberating the unconscious, a core Surrealist principle he championed from the movement's inception in 1924. Salvador Dalí embodied surreal humour in his flamboyant public persona, which he cultivated as a promotional spectacle to popularize , often staging outrageous antics and blending them with his writings and art to provoke and amuse. His , developed in the 1930s, harnessed self-induced paranoid states—rooted in personal traumas like childhood exposure to disturbing images and family conflicts—to generate irrational associations, yielding humorous yet unsettling double images in pieces like (1931). The Surrealist group, under Breton's influence, fostered such humour through collaborative games like the (exquisite corpse), where participants contributed sequentially to drawings or texts, producing absurd results such as , , and Breton's 1930 pastel depicting whimsical, disjointed figures. Luis Buñuel, a key Surrealist filmmaker, exemplified dinner-party absurdism in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), where affluent characters endure increasingly bizarre interruptions to their meals—such as sudden deaths, dream sequences, and hallucinatory encounters—satirizing bourgeois propriety through ironic, sado-comic deflations of social rituals. Co-written with Jean-Claude Carrière, the film earned the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1973, signifying surreal humour's breakthrough into mainstream acclaim. In the late 20th century, extended surreal humour into cinema with (1977), a nightmarish portrayal of industrial alienation and fatherhood featuring mechanical, puppet-like characters and absurd domestic scenes, such as a dinner where a family member flings food in catatonic frenzy, deliberately balancing horror with comedic unease to evoke life's inherent ridiculousness. and , known as Tim and Eric, revived surreal humour in 2000s via Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! (–2010), parodying with dark, anti-humorous vignettes of bizarre consumerism and bodily grotesquerie, eliciting discomfort through exaggerated, surreal banality. incorporated absurd scenarios into satirical prose in (1996), such as a tennis academy's apocalyptic game of Eschaton and a lethally addictive film, to critique entertainment addiction, blending exaggerated irrationality with incisive cultural commentary.

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