Absurdity Day

What the day is

Absurdity Day is observed on November 20. The usual description of it is circular, a senseless day to be marked senselessly, which is a fair joke but leaves the better meaning of the word unused.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented.

Absurdity in the philosophical sense is not silliness. It names a specific collision: human beings require meaning, and the universe supplies none. Albert Camus set this out in The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942, taking the figure condemned to roll a boulder uphill forever as the model of an ordinary life.

What makes the essay unusual is where it lands. Camus rejects both suicide and the leap to religious faith as evasions of the problem, and argues instead for living in full awareness of the contradiction, closing with the line "one must imagine Sisyphus happy". The conclusion is defiance rather than despair, and it is the part most summaries drop.

The idea reached the stage a decade later. Martin Esslin coined Theater of the Absurd in 1960 for playwrights who dramatized the same problem through form rather than argument: Beckett's two men waiting for someone who never arrives, Ionesco's couples exchanging fluent nonsense. The dialogue fails to communicate because that failure is the subject.

The everyday sense of the word connects more closely than it appears. Incongruity, the collision of two frames that should not fit together, underlies a large share of humor, and the pleasure comes from recognizing the mismatch rather than resolving it.

How to take part

• Read The Myth of Sisyphus, which is far shorter than its reputation suggests.
• Watch or read Waiting for Godot, ideally without reading a summary first.
• Do something genuinely pointless and enjoy it on its own terms.
• Notice an absurd rule at work and ask what it was originally for. Often nobody knows.
• Resist explaining the joke.