Surreal Comedies And Their Amazing Qualities

By Ronald Martin


After reason has played out, something else can take its place in theater, film, novels or fiction. This can be the subconscious, where illogical events occur but are acceptable, having combined qualities of transport and fantasy that might be solely called a creation of the imagination. This is the place where people can connect with dreams, where impossible combinations are possible and believable.

Surrealism has long been a thing in art and the theater, but it was not until a century or so ago that it became a well defined item. Before that, artists, writers and poets relied on dream figures or events, on the supernatural and the actions of seemingly crazy or twisted characters. The element of surrealism or surreal comedies, though, has been there from the onset.

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.

Most times this element can be done with some humor, since illogic can often be very funny. This is the reason why surrealist art often works very well with comedy. There is a specific school for surrealism, although its golden age has passed, a time when artists truly exposed its boundaries and specific characteristics.

Mainstream works and others that belong to certain disciplines may partake of surrealist humor, when and if they are well prepared for. In the surreal discipline itself, audience expectations are always subverted and the art plays many tricks on common beliefs and everyday actions. Because these are rote, reasonable and mundane but very easily twisted into phantasm.

Not being predictable and safely reasonable can often be viewed as very humorous, surprisingly so. Audiences make the gestalt connection but cannot identify it, since the source is often subconscious, lying there waiting to be discovered. Comedies are thus made better, since connecting to this world makes things look clearer than usual.

The connection, though, is not something grasped easily, and can dissolve quickly in the outside world. It is one reason that surrealist comedies are remembered well and appreciated whenever they are mounted. The mainstream may not support them, but they can do the breakthrough into being acceptable and popular.

Also, the field of film animation is the playground of surrealist humor. Things in this place do not conform to any reality that the mind can grasp or is experienced about. But the characters and stories for these now have a very established hold on the popular imagination, even as the surrealist world itself is not something that many people will connect to cartoons and animation.

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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