Absurdist Humor Since 1889: How We Accidentally Made Nonsense Into an Art Form
LONDON—It began in 1889 when someone decided that comedy no longer needed to follow the rules of logic, and for the past 135 years, we’ve been collectively paying for that decision. British comedy has since evolved from structured joke-telling into a sophisticated practice of confusing people until they laugh out of sheer desperation, creating what we now call absurdist humor since 1889—a tradition of deliberately making no sense whatsoever.
The 1889 Origin Story: Where Nonsense Became Respectable
The story of absurdist humor since 1889 begins not with a punchline but with a profound existential crisis. In the closing decade of the 19th century, Victorian society was starting to crack. The Industrial Revolution had made everything efficient and terrible. Science was explaining away mystery. Logic had become tyrannical. And somewhere in this atmosphere of crushing rationality, someone looked around and thought: “What if we just… stopped making sense?”
Gilbert and Sullivan were perfecting their operettas—comedy with structure, with logic, with clear satirical targets. But absurdist humor since 1889 took a different path. It rejected the idea that comedy needed targets, structure, or even comprehension. Instead, it asked a dangerous question: What if the joke is that there is no joke?
This wasn’t initially called “absurdist humor.” That term wouldn’t gain prominence until the mid-20th century. But the spirit was there from the beginning—a British determination to take the most illogical path possible while insisting it was perfectly reasonable.
The Early Years: 1889-1920, When Nonsense Was Still Slightly Coherent
In the early decades of absurdist humor since 1889, comedians were still learning the rules they intended to break. They hadn’t yet figured out that you could abandon logic entirely. Instead, they did something more interesting: they created internal logic systems that made no external sense whatsoever.
Music hall comedians of the 1890s would perform sketches where characters moved through scenarios that obeyed their own bizarre rules. A man would spend fifteen minutes explaining why his hat was actually a philosophy. Nobody questioned this. The audience simply accepted that within the world of the sketch, hats could be epistemological frameworks. This was the birth of absurdist humor since 1889—not in the avant-garde intellectual salons, but in the sweaty, beer-soaked music halls of London and Manchester.
The genius of this era was that they performed absurdity with absolute seriousness. There were no winks to the audience. The performers genuinely seemed to believe that a teacup could be a valid character. This deadpan delivery of complete nonsense would become the foundational technique of all subsequent absurdist humor.
World War I’s Contribution to Nonsense: Dada and Disillusionment
Then came World War I, which essentially proved that reality had abandoned logic entirely. Millions of people died in trenches for reasons nobody could properly explain. Logic had failed catastrophically. Reason had been weaponized. And so, naturally, comedians and artists responded by creating art that made no sense whatsoever.
The Dada movement emerged from the recognition that if the real world was absurd, then art should be equally absurd. Absurdist humor since 1889 suddenly had philosophical legitimacy. You weren’t just being funny—you were responding to the fundamental meaninglessness of existence. This was tremendously convenient for British comedians, who could now claim that their complete inability to make coherent jokes was actually a sophisticated artistic statement.
1920s-1940s: The Golden Age of Nonsense Legitimacy
By the 1920s, absurdist humor since 1889 had become almost respectable. Writers like James Joyce were creating literature that made no traditional sense. Surrealists were painting melting clocks and calling it profound. And in Britain, comedians realized they could perform complete gibberish and call it revolutionary.
The music hall tradition evolved. Performers like those documented by NewsThump’s historical comedy archives began creating act structures that abandoned conventional narrative entirely. A sketch might begin with a man in a bowler hat, transition to a discussion of vegetables that speak in riddles, and end with someone tap-dancing while reciting cricket statistics. The audience laughed not because they understood what was happening, but because the sheer confidence with which the performers delivered complete nonsense was somehow charismatic.
This was the crucial discovery of absurdist humor since 1889: confidence in the face of incomprehensibility is itself hilarious. If you say something completely ridiculous with enough conviction, people will laugh because they’re uncertain whether you’re serious or not. That uncertainty becomes the comedy.
Post-War Britain: Existential Comedy Becomes Post-War Comedy
After 1945, Britain was exhausted, rationed, and deeply confused about its place in the world. The Empire was collapsing. Technology was accelerating. Society was changing. And so absurdist humor since 1889 finally found its perfect moment. This was a country that understood, at a fundamental level, that nothing made sense anymore.
In the 1950s, comedians began moving from music halls to radio, television, and theatre. The medium changed, but the philosophy remained: say something that makes no logical sense, deliver it with complete seriousness, and somehow people will find it profoundly funny because it perfectly captures the experience of living in a world that makes no sense.
1960s-1970s: When Absurdist Humor Since 1889 Met the Establishment
The 1960s saw absurdist humor since 1889 achieve mainstream dominance. Shows like “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” (1969) took everything that had been developing since the 1890s and presented it directly to millions of people. This wasn’t comedy that was trying to be respectable—it was comedy that was confident in its own ridiculousness.
Monty Python wasn’t inventing absurdist humor. They were simply the most visible expression of a tradition that had been developing for eighty years. Every technique they used had been refined in music halls and variety shows. But they had television, which meant they could reach people who’d never encountered organized nonsense before.
A sketch could begin with dead parrots, progress to spam, and end with knights who said “Ni!” Nobody was supposed to understand the internal logic because there was no internal logic. The humor came from the confidence of the presentation, the precision of the timing, and the absolute refusal to wink at the audience and admit that this was ridiculous.
This era proved something crucial about absurdist humor since 1889: it works better with higher production values. The more professional the production, the funnier the nonsense becomes. British television audiences in the 1970s discovered that expensive, well-produced gibberish was somehow more hilarious than casual gibberish.
1980s-1990s: When Absurdist Humor Became Too Absurd
By the 1980s, a problem emerged. Absurdist humor since 1889 had become so popular that comedians were now competing to be more absurd than the previous generation. This created a comedic arms race where shock value and incomprehensibility were continuously escalated.
Some comedians responded by trying to be maximally absurd—creating comedy that was so disconnected from reality that it approached pure nonsense without any underlying structure. Others moved in a different direction, realizing that the most effective absurdist humor came from taking mundane, everyday situations and finding their inherent illogic.
This bifurcation created what we might call the “absurdist humor since 1889 crisis.” Pure absurdism without any anchor to reality became exhausting. But absurdism that found meaning in the mundane—that revealed how everyday life was already illogical—became infinitely more powerful.
The British Contribution: Making the Ordinary Extraordinary
British comedians realized something that Americans generally missed: the most effective absurdist humor doesn’t come from completely abandoning reality. It comes from pointing out that reality is already absurd. A London commute, bureaucracy, customer service, relationships—these are already so illogical that they need no exaggeration.
Absurdist humor since 1889 reached maturity in this period when it understood that its job wasn’t to create nonsense. Its job was to reveal the nonsense that was already present in ordinary life. A waiting room full of people waiting for nothing. A conversation where nobody is actually listening. A system designed so inefficiently that it must have been deliberately created that way. These were the raw materials of mature absurdist humor.
1990s-2000s: The Internet Age and the Democratization of Nonsense
Then the internet happened, and everything changed for absurdist humor since 1889. Suddenly, anyone could create and distribute nonsense. The tradition that had been carefully crafted by professional comedians over a hundred years was now democratized. And this was both terrible and wonderful.
Terrible because a lot of internet humor was just randomness without any structure or craft. Wonderful because it revealed that absurdist humor’s core principle—that nonsense could be funny—had always been accessible to everyone. You didn’t need professional production values or theatrical training. You just needed confidence and a willingness to not explain the joke.
Memes became the modern vehicle for absurdist humor. A format would emerge, people would add increasingly illogical variations, and somehow through the collective nonsense, profound truth would emerge. This was absurdist humor since 1889 arriving at its logical conclusion: chaos organized into something communicable.
2010s-Present: When Reality Became the Joke
The final evolution of absurdist humor since 1889 has been its merger with reality. Beginning with the 2010s and accelerating through the 2020s, actual news became indistinguishable from satire. Politicians began saying things that would have been considered too absurd for even the most experimental comedy.
This created a unique problem for absurdist humor. How do you write absurd comedy when the government is already doing it? The answer has been to push even further into the absurd, to create comedy that is so illogical that it actually makes sense compared to real events.
British satirical websites like those featured on ThePoke discovered that the only way to satirize modern politics was through pure absurdism. “Government Announces New Policy Consisting Entirely of Emojis” became simultaneously impossible and plausible. “Prime Minister Solves Healthcare Crisis by Declaring Medicine is Imagination-Based” was absurd but not absurd enough compared to actual policy proposals.
The Philosophical Underpinning: Why Absurdist Humor Since 1889 Matters
Over 135 years, absurdist humor since 1889 has evolved from a music hall novelty into a sophisticated artistic response to the fundamental meaninglessness of existence. It’s not that comedians are trying to be clever. It’s that they’ve recognized something genuine: life doesn’t make sense, logic fails, systems break down, and sometimes the only honest response is laughter at the complete ridiculousness of everything.
A Victorian audience watching a performer explain why his hat was a valid philosophical argument was witnessing the birth of a tradition that would eventually encompass everything from Monty Python to internet memes. The through-line wasn’t innovation—it was refinement. Each generation understood the core principle better: confidence in the face of incomprehension is comedy.
Regional Variations: Why This Matters for British Comedy
Absurdist humor since 1889 has always been fundamentally British, though it developed differently across the UK. London developed the theatrical, carefully-constructed absurdism. Scotland developed the aggressive, existentially-threatening variant. Wales created its own form—more poetic absurdism. Northern England created working-class absurdism that found ridicule in bureaucratic inefficiency.
The British invented this form of comedy because British life is already absurd. A class system that nominally doesn’t exist but structures everything. A monarchy based on tradition and precedent. A political system where tradition and procedure matter more than results. An archipelago where people pay different taxes depending on which island they live on. The British didn’t create absurdist humor to escape reality—they created it to describe reality accurately.
Conclusion: 135 Years of Sophisticated Nonsense
Absurdist humor since 1889 represents one of humanity’s most important artistic developments. It’s not a joke style or a technique. It’s a philosophical framework that says: if the world is illogical, art should be illogical too. If reality is absurd, comedy should embrace that absurdity.
For a comprehensive exploration of how this tradition has evolved and continues to influence contemporary comedy, explore The Poke’s extensive archive of absurdist British humor, where 135 years of accumulated nonsense is celebrated, refined, and continuously pushed into new territory.
SOURCE: https://thepoke.com