We had an argument about absurdist humor at the salon the other night. I argued that it was akin to the (false) distinction I learned about fiction awhile back, that there are 2 kinds: 1) ordinary people in weird context or 2) ordinary context with weird people. My stance was that absurdist humor was a form of (1). The Wikipedia page backs me a bit, I guess, in the cherry-picked claim that it's "predicated on deliberate violations of causal reasoning". But my principle adversary proposed that the pet store skit, Cleese and the context were ordinary but Palin was weird. My counter was that Palin and Cleese were ordinary, two typically self-defensive arguers in a ridiculous context. (The gods know this particular dude has argued some ridiculous stances like the ambiguity of the word "energetics" in an ecological context ... so he should recognize when entrenched people get stuck arguing emphatically about the meanings of words.)
I think one of the reasons I *want* to believe in parallel worlds and a fully embellished conception of counterfactuals is *because* of my preference for stories with such variation in what can be tweaked and then iterated forward to watch the consequences. It's also why I'm gobsmacked by alternative logics, despite my incompetence therein. What we call "absurd" almost never really feels absurd to me. It's fine! Just play along. On 2/3/22 13:15, Steve Smith wrote:
Stephen C Gould, the difference between SF and Fantasy is that in SF, one singular known fact is changed (faster than light travel, time travel, wormhole, infinite cheap energy, etc.) and everything else ensues from that, while in Fantasy, *everything* is up for grabs (e.g. Magic) and everything ensues from that! Zelazny's Amber-schtick seems to follow *somewhat* from that idea... in some sense, it seems as if everything Magical he invoked was somehow a natural consequence of the schmear of physical laws across the schmear of parallel worlds suspended between the antipodes of Logos and Chaos (my interpretation of his deal)...
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