Blog Post 8 (due 5 PM Wednesday 26th March)

Thomas Nagel argues that life is absurd not because of its brevity, insignificance, or lack of cosmic meaning, but because of a conflict within us.… Read More »Nagel’s The Absurd and The Truman Show

*Content warning: Mentions/ depictions of (attempted) suicide When explicating Freud’s theoretical ideas on humour, Simon Critchley notes that, according to Freud, humour is resultant from… Read More »Freudian Humour and In Bruges (2008)

*Content warning: mentions of suicide   Freud believes that melancholy thinkers are able to achieve a level of self-awareness that can result in humor, or… Read More »Dark Humor in Little Miss Sunshine

Thomas Nagel on his essay The Absurd denotes the … absurdity… of the individual’s existence and the consequential existentialism that follows the realising one is… Read More »Paul Rudd needs no ego because he will live with himself forever

Absurdism, as Thomas Nagel argues, comes from the “conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality” (718).  Absurdist comedy, then, follows the incongruity model, placing… Read More »One Sheep Was Blown Up in the Making of This Film

Another man’s abject object can be another’s subject—it is, after all, the incongruity between appearances that produces the humorous effect. Absurdity, in particular, appears to… Read More »The Absurdity of Customer Service (Parthiv Chhabria)