Why Surreal Comedies Are Popular Today

By Ronald Martin


When reason reaches the end of its rope, something else can take its place in the creative arts. This world is one where dreams or elements of the subconscious are contained, illogical but very feasible in a fantastic realm, something creative imaginations can make. This place is where reason and unreason become friends, where impossible events are made possible and more real.

Surreal elements have been long used for theater and other arts, but the term was only truly defined maybe a century before. Since then, writers, painters and other artists left of dream and fantasy or even the supernatural and making crazy characters that fit these elements. However surrealism or surreal comedies were there always, simply waiting to be identified and defined.

It is no wonder that this is so, because this element truly belongs to the human experience. People, from kings to paupers, have dreamt strange dreams, and where once it was thought to be a gift from the gods, it now has been identified as belonging to our subconscious. And its realm is sleep, during times that the logical mind rests and the subconscious plays.

Art in the mainstream may also be a venue for the discipline, since mainstream works now partake of all kinds of surrealist and fantastic elements. But at the core of it, surrealism provides wild bursts of insight into mundane reality, making creative paths behind seemingly illogical things. Superstitions, beliefs and mundane reality is supplanted by the allegory of the fantastic.

The mainstream can also be the venue for surrealism, because it now incorporates many of its elements and other things besides. Right in this discipline, though, audiences expect the unexpected, or accept subversions of reality readily, because they can see reason behind the illogic. It often bursts the bubble of commonly believed things and the mundane into the fantastic.

The scenes here are the most unpredictable, and often the element of surprise can elicit intuitive laughter. This is the kind of laughter that lies in the depths of the subconscious, in the secret fantasy world of the human mind. This is what the comedies are trying to reach and connect to, and something that the best of them are capable of.

But the connection is not easily captured, and its being thus diaphanous can make it disappear with mundane reality. Thus the best comedies are thus that capture the imagination and are remembered well. Mainstream considerations can sift them out, but this makes room for some of best works to make it into popular acceptance.

The animation field, too, is one place where surreal humor shines. It is because the place does not need to conform with reason to have the human mind understand the experience. Animation has captured the world, and is in fact an established genre that is very popular, but its surrealist reality can often be ignored, because they are cartoons where anything can happen.

The makers of this world are thus adepts at transforming subconscious elements into whole, integrated stories that have an illogically logical beginning, middle and end. It is not a matter of twisting weird elements into a whole. Surrealism relies on a subterranean foothold on reality, and this is because it works within the precincts of a dream.




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