The Fine Line of the Ridiculous
How our different worlds create strange borderlands of absurdity
“There's a fine line between ridiculous and the way it is”
- !!!, “Crazy Talk”
A friend’s remark has stuck with me as a unique take on humanity’s situation: we are the only species with a physiological response to absurdity. We laugh. Perhaps dolphins laugh too, but either way our peculiar talent to amuse ourselves with the ridiculous is something that has tended to escape notice when we ponder our excellences. It is not that we do not value comedians - we love those who practice ludicrous speech and invent comical situations. But there is no Nobel prize for comedy…
The art of the comedic is to reflect upon the authentic truths of life and present them from the most absurd angles. Because it draws upon the familiar, a great deal of comedy is bound to a particular language or culture - not everyone will find it amusing. Even within a single nation there is not a unified cultural background, so jokes can be offensive to some and hilarious to others. Hence stand-up comedians are among the most acute observers of human behaviour - they, far more than musicians and writers (and infinitely more than painters or sculptors) must learn to read the room, to uncover just how far into the realm of the ridiculous they can push their act each time they take to the stage.
Founded in California but tempered and honed in New York City, the band named !!! have had a wicked sense of humour throughout their career. It’s epitomised by their ungoogleable name, pronounced by making three consecutive percussive noises - any will do! Their latest album, Let It Be Blue, builds upon the eclectic collisions of funk, punk, and musical junk that they’ve been exploring and refining for more than twenty years. Incredible in the studio and utterly astonishing live, !!! blend comedy and tragedy with an effortlessness that would make your head spin if you were not so busy tapping your feet or singing along with their infectious compositions.
They speak on one track of their latest album about “the fine line between ridiculous and the way it is”, going on to say:
’Cause jokes tell truths
And before you know it
You’re getting down to the root
With that crazy talk
Whatever !!! might think about it, this ‘fine line’ is a much more profound observation than it first appears, and speaks to our unique capacity for laughter. My wife and I have always enjoyed this aspect of !!!’s music, from their debut to today, but I know it would leave others cold. I cannot imagine many of our Christian friends finding !!! as amusing as we do (and not because Christians don’t possess a sense of humour!). It is the nature of the ridiculous that it is just as capable of brushing up against profundity as it is of indulging in the schadenfreude of slapstick. Yet as !!! say, “jokes tell truths”. Why is this?
Because we are each situated within our own worlds - worlds we share with others but that are nonetheless unique to us - we come at our experiences from a particular angle, shaped more by the world we live in than by the planet we live upon. An ingrained philosophical habit borrowed from the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant asks us to call this ‘subjective’. We’re supposed to contrast it against the ‘objective’. But objective truth is merely the truth of objects, and objects never laugh. It is we who are the subjects of our own stories who can laugh at our own absurdity - just as we can harden into anger when we refuse to find something funny.
Truth always exceeds us. To reach even a partially complete true depiction of “the way it is” requires us to escape from our own world into neighbouring worlds, ones close enough for us to visit, and to revel in the absurdity of how we look from the outside. Jokes push up against the borders between worlds, and this is the ‘fine line of the ridiculous’ - nothing less than an encounter with the boundaries of who we are, a glimpse into what we ordinarily cannot even imagine. There is wisdom indeed in our crazy talk, we just have to be willing to acknowledge - even for just an instant - the utter ridiculousness of human existence.
For Adria