Absurdity is my favorite brand of humor because deep down inside

In the vast tapestry of human existence, where the threads of reality weave in and out, we often find ourselves standing on the edge of something both strange and familiar. The words of Weyes Blood—"Absurdity is my favorite brand of humor because deep down inside, in our subconscious, it's all surrealism. It's all abstract. The world is the surrealism, the absurdity, the humor—it all just overlaps."—speak to a truth that transcends time and space, a truth as old as the ancient philosophers who pondered the very nature of existence. The essence of life, they tell us, is neither as solid nor as linear as we might expect. Instead, it is a swirling dance of the real and the imagined, where absurdity and humor are not mere distractions, but revelations of the deeper truths that lie hidden within the fabric of our lives.

The ancient Greeks, in their wisdom, often spoke of the absurd nature of the world. Heraclitus, the philosopher of flux, famously said that "you cannot step into the same river twice." What he was pointing to, in essence, was the ever-changing, fleeting quality of existence—the idea that the world is not a place of rigid, predictable order but one of constant transformation. In this sense, life itself is an absurd spectacle, one where the rules we cling to dissolve like mist, and we are left to navigate a sea of contradictions. It is in this ebb and flow, this beautiful chaos, that humor arises—not as a fleeting escape, but as a deep recognition of the inherent absurdity of life.

Surrealism, too, has roots in ancient thought. While the term itself may be modern, the notion of a world that exists beyond the grasp of reason is ancient. Plato, in his Allegory of the Cave, spoke of humans trapped in a world of shadows, unable to see the true forms of things. To escape the cave, to rise above the illusion of ordinary perception, is to step into a world where the abstract becomes real and the surreal becomes illuminating. This allegory speaks to the idea that the true nature of life is often hidden behind the mundane, that reality itself is abstract, and that only through the lens of imagination and abstraction can we glimpse the deeper truths of existence.

In the realm of art, this surrealism was embraced by those who sought to transcend the ordinary and capture the elusive nature of human experience. The Surrealist movement, led by figures like Salvador Dalí and André Breton, was born from the desire to break free from the chains of rationality and to explore the subconscious mind. Their work was filled with the absurd, the unpredictable, and the unexplainable—expressions of the inner workings of the mind that defied conventional logic. Like the ancient mystics who sought to understand the world through symbols and visions, the Surrealists understood that truth could not be grasped through the conventional methods of thought, but through the wild, the unexpected, and the absurd.

This idea of life as an overlapping of surrealism and absurdity is not merely a poetic observation; it is a profound insight into the human experience. In our subconscious, as Weyes Blood suggests, we are all aware of the strangeness of the world. Reality, as we experience it, is a construct—a mere shadow of something greater. The humor that arises from the absurdity of life is not a denial of this, but a celebration. It is a reminder that, in the face of chaos and incoherence, there is beauty, there is joy, and there is truth. The absurdity of the world, in all its wildness, invites us not to escape, but to engage—to embrace the strangeness and find meaning within it.

Consider, for a moment, the example of Zen Buddhism, which embraces the absurd as a pathway to enlightenment. The Zen masters often used koans—paradoxical riddles that defy rational thinking—to push their students beyond ordinary perception. One famous koan asks, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" The question itself is absurd, for it cannot be answered in the conventional sense. Yet, it is precisely this absurdity that forces the student to step outside the realm of logic and into the realm of intuition and insight. The Zen master’s humor lies not in making the world seem trivial, but in opening the mind to the profound mystery of existence.

And so, the lesson we learn from Weyes Blood’s words, and from the teachings of the ancients, is this: life is absurd—a beautiful, chaotic dance of the real and the imagined, the rational and the surreal. It is not a place of order, but a realm where contradictions can exist side by side, where the humor of the universe emerges from the strangest of places. In this absurdity, we find the seeds of wisdom. The challenge, then, is not to fight against the chaos, but to embrace it. To see the humor in life’s contradictions, to laugh in the face of the surreal, and to find meaning in the absurd.

In our own lives, let us walk with open eyes, recognizing that the world is not always what it seems. Let us embrace the surreal, the abstract, and the absurd, for it is in these spaces that we can find deeper truths about ourselves and the universe. Like the Zen master, we must learn to ask the questions that cannot be answered by logic alone and to laugh at the paradoxes that life presents. In doing so, we may find the key to understanding the mystery of existence and the profound joy that lies hidden within the absurdity of it all.