>>I'm thinking how absurd to sugar coat with fabrications like "fairness" what the existentialists used to call the absurd.
Absurd? You want absurd? Listen to this joke: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkFb84FsQU8It's the same joke twice-told. The first part of the joke, the real joke, is the unexpected point-of-view switch. The comic slows his delivery to let the absurdity of the reversal hit the audience. He lets it dwell. Beat-beat-beat. Then he unleashes the absurd explication of the reversal, staccato and martellato, with a crash-boom ending. It's what you already knew from the first part, only bounced off your head.
So what is absurd? The unreasonable? The preposterous? The joke? If it is one of them, we should remember that a joke exists to reassure us that jokes have meaning and their meaning is laughter.
We don't sugar coat pain for example. Instead we try to outlast it, as Beethoven shows in his String Quartet 15. If it's real pain and people try to glaze it for us, their rationalizations end empty as Job's friends' did...which forces Yahweh to show up and give them their talking-to. Oh God, here comes another whirlwind. Absurd.
Laughter isn't the sugar coating ... the sugar coating is assuming that absurdity could mean something other than laughter. Like sawdust and oyster shells.
Yours, Roquentin ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
