Absurdity, for Nagel, comes from the human ability to take a “backward step”– to perform detached self-analysis, distanced self-critique and meta-cognition– yet our unrelenting pursuit of life in spite of this:
“We see ourselves from outside… Yet when we take this view and recognize what we do as arbitrary, it does not disengage us from life, and there lies our absurdity” (Nagel 720).
Freud’s account builds an explicit link between meta-cognition and humor. The super-ego, acting as a self-aware, punitive mocker, renders our ego “tiny and its interests trivial” in the face of situations that otherwise might call for reaction/affect (Freud 162, 164).
Ultimately, we find ourselves helplessly aware of our own helplessness, our ceaselessness; yet one can choose to accept this comically, as humor, rather than a site for despair or heroics.
This clip from the show Smiling Friends emphasizes the hollow, humorlessness that Nagel criticizes certain explanations and justifications for the absurdity of life. In this episode, down on his luck Desmond is being shown a good time to make him happy, but each of the attempts fails or is picked apart by cynical Desmond. A crucial idea that reoccurs in Nagel’s piece is of circularity, the inability to truly move beyond something, rather being stuck in motion that never actually gains distance:
“We step back to find that the whole system of justification and criticism… rests on responses and habits that we never question, that we should not know how to defend without circularity, and to which we shall continue to adhere even after they are called into question” (Nagel 720).
When one looks at the logic of the cynical, ‘nothing matters’ type, you find very rigid philosophy: Desmond finds that his life is ultimately worthless because he sees it as pursuing a string of “momentary distractions” from “the fact that the sun is just going to explode”. Nagel points out the teleological flaw in this perspective. Life is not lived as a string of events, it is lived in present moments, the joys of which are not bound in their baring on future/past events. Further, by trying to tie the mundane and quotidian joys of life to broader justifications, one creates a regime of justifications that “makes it impossible to supply any reasons at all” (Nagel 718).
I think Smiling Friends is an interesting example of absurdity because it engages in both an absurdist nihilism (with the characters they often help) and an absurdist optimism. While neither of these clips showcase the sort of dark, gallows humor that Freud describes, Nagel’s neutral absurdity is simply the means to “appreciate the cosmic unimportance of the situation” (Nagel 727). Living in a post-absurdist time, with a watered down telling of its ideas widely accepted of ‘God is dead’ and ‘nothing matters’, seeing the inverse– absurdist romantics, aware and in love with arbitrary joys– provides a culture-wide comic reenvisioning of these ideas.
I LOVE SMILING FRIENDS. It is so absurd – and thus a perfect example for this. There is indeed a certain nihilism that Nagel would try to disconnect from how the show presents absurdism, but, as you explain, it is entirely relevant for their career as Smiling Friends as much as the concept of absurd optimism you bring up.