Absurdist and Surreal Comedy: When the Joke Abandons Logic
Talking objects, sketches that never end and characters who accept the impossible without blinking. A guide to the comedy of nonsense, and why it's harder to write than it looks.
Absurdist comedy is the comedy of the impossible played straight: a parrot that is definitely dead, a sketch that won't stop, a man who insists his hot-dog costume doesn't belong to him. Its engine is not randomness but commitment: a ridiculous premise treated with total seriousness, followed by its own strange logic to the end. This guide traces absurdist and surreal comedy from Victorian nonsense verse to Julio Torres, explains the techniques that make it work, and suggests where to start.
Absurd, surreal, anti: sorting the terms
The labels get used loosely, but there are useful distinctions.
- Surreal comedy
- Dreamlike images and impossible juxtapositions, named after the 1920s Surrealist movement. A fish slapping dance, a giant foot from the sky.
- Absurdist comedy
- A premise that breaks reality, followed with rigorous internal logic. Also used, after the Theatre of the Absurd, for comedy about a meaningless universe.
- Nonsense
- Language and logic games with no real-world referent, as in Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear.
- Anti-comedy
- Comedy that deliberately refuses the expected shape of a joke: no punchline, dead air, the comedian failing on purpose. It often overlaps with absurdism but is aimed at comedy's own conventions. See our guide to anti-comedy.
Where it came from
Nonsense and the avant-garde
English absurd humour starts with the Victorian nonsense writers. Edward Lear's limericks and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) built worlds with rules that are perfectly consistent and completely mad, which is still the best description of absurdist comedy. In France, Alfred Jarry's play Ubu Roi (1896) opened with a profane made-up word and caused a riot. The Dadaists of Zurich (1916) and the Surrealists in Paris (from the 1920s) made irrationality into a programme; their art is full of jokes, and comedians have been borrowing from it ever since.
The Theatre of the Absurd
The critic Martin Esslin coined the phrase "Theatre of the Absurd" in his 1961 book of that name, for playwrights such as Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco. Ionesco's The Bald Soprano (1950) is a married couple talking in phrasebook clichés until language collapses. Beckett's Waiting for Godot (first staged in Paris in 1953) is two tramps passing time with music-hall routines while waiting for someone who never comes. These plays drew on Camus's idea of the absurd (see our essay on comedy and philosophy) and on the double acts of vaudeville. They are also funny, which is easy to forget.
The Goons and the Pythons
In Britain the line runs through radio. The Goon Show (BBC, 1951–1960), written mostly by Spike Milligan and performed with Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe, used sound effects and wild leaps of logic to create a world that was only possible on the radio. The Beatles and the Pythons both cited it as an influence.
Monty Python's Flying Circus (BBC, 1969–1974) took the Goons' anarchy to television. Its sketches often had no endings, ran into each other or were stopped by a colonel complaining that things had got too silly. Terry Gilliam's animations linked everything with surrealist collage. The Python idea that a sketch could follow a ludicrous premise to its logical extreme (a man returning a dead parrot, a ministry for silly walks) is the most influential template in sketch comedy.
The British alternative wave
The alternative comedy boom made absurdism a staple. Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer's Vic Reeves Big Night Out (1990) parodied variety shows with nonsensical catchphrases and characters; their panel show Shooting Stars turned a quiz into a surreal ritual. Big Train, Jam and later The Mighty Boosh (2004), with Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt, pushed the form in different directions: deadpan, nightmarish and psychedelic. Our history of British alternative comedy covers the scene.
American absurdism
In the US, Steven Wright's deadpan one-liners in the 1980s built a whole persona out of calm, impossible observations. Andy Kaufman took absurdity off the page and into real life. The Kids in the Hall (Canadian, but huge in the US) combined character comedy with sudden swerves into the surreal. Conan O'Brien's late-night writers' room was a training ground for absurd bits, and Adult Swim made absurdism its house style from the early 2000s.
Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! (Adult Swim, 2007–2010) weaponised public-access video and corporate training tapes into nightmarish nonsense. Casper Kelly's short Too Many Cooks (2014), a sitcom opening that never ends and gradually turns into a horror film, is among the most perfect absurdist pieces ever broadcast. The Eric Andre Show (from 2012) turned the talk-show format into a crime scene.
Absurdism now
The most celebrated absurdist comedy of recent years is Tim Robinson's sketch show I Think You Should Leave (Netflix, from 2019), in which ordinary social embarrassment escalates into deranged commitment. Julio Torres represents a gentler strand: his stand-up special My Favorite Shapes (HBO, 2019) is a guided tour of objects on a conveyor belt, his HBO series Los Espookys (co-created with Ana Fabrega and Fred Armisen) follows friends who stage horror scenes for hire, and his film Problemista (A24, 2024) renders immigration bureaucracy as a fairy-tale quest. The Australian comedian Sam Campbell, Conner O'Malley's unhinged videos and Sarah Sherman's gross-out surrealism show how broad the field has become.
Why nonsense is funny
Incongruity theory (explained in our guide to comedy research) is the obvious explanation: we laugh at what doesn't fit. But pure randomness isn't funny for long. Psychologists who study humour appreciation distinguish "incongruity-resolution" jokes, where the punchline makes a twisted kind of sense, from "nonsense" humour, where the incongruity is left partly unresolved. People vary a lot in how much they enjoy the second kind; Willibald Ruch's research has linked a taste for nonsense humour with openness to experience.
The best absurdist comedy sits between the two. It creates an incongruity, then resolves it according to a new, ridiculous logic that the audience learns as they go. Once you understand the rule (this man will never admit he was wrong; this object has feelings), each escalation is funny precisely because it is predictable within the madness.
How absurdist comedy is built
- Anchor it in the real. A recognisable setting (an office, a dinner party, a job interview) makes the impossible element stand out. Most I Think You Should Leave sketches start somewhere completely ordinary.
- Play it straight. Characters treat the absurd as normal. The moment a performer winks, the spell breaks.
- Escalate by logic. Each beat follows from the last according to the sketch's internal rule. "If this is true, what else is true?"
- Collide registers. Mundane details applied to fantastic situations, or grand language applied to trivial ones. Torres describing a phone charger with the pathos of a tragedy.
- Commit to duration. Absurdist comedy often runs longer than is comfortable, as in Too Many Cooks, until the length becomes part of the joke.
- Know when the logic breaks. The best bits end by snapping the rule or by abandoning it with a shrug, as Python did with the colonel.
If you want to write it, our guide to comedy writing techniques covers premise and escalation in more detail.
Why absurdism speaks to younger audiences
Absurdist comedy has been especially popular with millennial and Gen Z audiences, and critics have offered several explanations. Internet culture is full of surreal memes whose humour depends on shared, escalating nonsense. Many young people describe the world (economic precarity, climate anxiety, information overload) as already absurd, so comedy that treats it that way feels realistic rather than escapist. And absurdism avoids the problem of punching anyone: when the joke is the logic itself, nobody is the butt. These are interpretations rather than measured findings, but they help explain why absurdism has moved from a niche to the centre of alternative comedy.
Where to start
Monty Python's Flying Circus
The template. Start with any series one or two episode and watch how sketches dissolve into each other.
The Goon Show
Spike Milligan's radio madness, the root of British absurdism.
Vic Reeves Big Night Out
Light entertainment as fever dream; the British alt scene at its strangest.
Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!
Public-access aesthetics turned into nightmare. Love it or hate it, it changed American comedy.
Too Many Cooks
Eleven minutes, one opening credits sequence, no escape.
I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson
Social anxiety pushed into the surreal. The defining sketch show of its generation.
Julio Torres, My Favorite Shapes
Absurdism with a soft heart, and a good entry point to Torres's world.
Absurdism versus randomness: a quick test
Critics sometimes dismiss absurdist comedy as "random". The best of it is the opposite. Ask three questions of any surreal sketch: Could you state its rule in a sentence? Does each beat follow from that rule? Would the sketch be funnier or less funny if a different random thing happened instead? If the answers are yes, yes and less funny, it is absurdism. If any old non sequitur would do, it is just noise. Our guide to comedy criticism has more on telling purposeful devices from gimmicks.
For absurdism's darker cousin, see dark comedy; for comedy that breaks form even more radically, see experimental comedy.
Frequently asked questions
What is absurdist comedy?
Absurdist comedy builds humour from situations that defy logic or reality, usually played completely straight. Characters accept impossible premises as normal, and the laughter comes from the gap between the nonsense and the seriousness with which it's treated.
What is the difference between absurdist and surreal comedy?
The terms overlap and are often used interchangeably. Surreal comedy usually means dreamlike imagery and impossible juxtapositions, after the Surrealist art movement; absurdist comedy more often means a logical system pushed to ridiculous ends, or the bleaker sense of a meaningless world associated with the Theatre of the Absurd.
Who are famous absurdist comedians?
Landmarks include Spike Milligan and The Goon Show, Monty Python, Steven Wright, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, The Mighty Boosh, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, Eric Andre, Tim Robinson and Julio Torres.
Is Julio Torres a surrealist?
His work is widely described as surreal. In his stand-up, Los Espookys and the film Problemista, objects and places have inner lives, and bureaucratic nightmares are rendered as fairy tales. It's a gentle, design-minded surrealism rather than the aggressive kind associated with Adult Swim.