Resource Guide for the Classroom: "Rock Out with Your Schnoz Out: The COVID Play"

Absurdist and Surrealist Comedy

According to The Encyclopedia of Humor Studies Volume 1, Absurdist humor is “humor concerned with the absence or refusal of meaning." It can be defined further as having “two main strands[:]...the rational absurd is concerned with the breakdown of logic…the existential absurd is concerned with the apparent meaninglessness of human existence" (1). An example of absurdist literature in the latter 20th century is “Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)” which both “feature characters struggling to make sense of worlds characterized by both logical and existential uncertainty." The main goal of absurdist humor is, "in fact, [to] help bring out the brighter side of the lack of meaning that it typically highlights" (4). 

Within Rock Out with Your Schnoz Out: The COVID Play, absurdist humor is used in the scene "Checking Out (Masked Avenger)." This scene, set in a grocery store, features customers attempting to buy products with the names "Meaning of Life...Sense of Purpose... [and] Reason to Get Out of Bed." The names of these products are meant to highlight how the pandemic caused many to go through an existential crisis. Just like most absurdist and surrealist comedy, this scene is "concerned with the apparent meaninglessness of human existence" brought to the forefront of many people's thoughts during the pandemic (1).