Absurdity Ascendant

""I go to my friend's place, open the door - but it is closed! I ring the bell - but there is none! So I didn't go there in the first place.""

""Wacky is filling your car's gas tank with 3-octane gasoline. Absurd is filling your car's gas tank with a ferret.""

- Triangle and Robert

Tropes about dadaism, nonsense, non sequiturs, the surreal and the bizarre. But not the Bazaar; that's something else.

Categories:
 * Madness Tropes

Tropes:

To measure the immeasurable. A space-time rift that looks like your last LSD trip. An advertisement in a work is ironic or otherwise inappropriate to the action. Something is declared true because nobody in their right mind would make up such a ridiculous story if it were false. A female expected to be assaulted is ignored, and becomes insulted over it. A non-sequitur answer when a more obvious solution is expected. The lofty or serious juxtaposed with the ludicrous or commonplace. A totally random event is inserted into a serious story, then never referred to again. Buildings built in impossible or nonsensical ways. A Big Lipped Alligator Moment that takes up a whole episode, though the episode itself is internally consistent. Cheese is funny. The game's rules are whatever you feel like.
 * Abstract Scale
 * Acid Trip Dimension
 * Ad Dissonance
 * Appeal to Audacity
 * Aren't You Going to Ravish Me
 * Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering
 * Bathos
 * Big Lipped Alligator Moment
 * Bizarrchitecture
 * Bizarro Episode
 * Blessed Are the Cheesemakers
 * Breathless Non Sequitur
 * Calvin Ball
 * Camp

You pretend you can win the argument if you get the other guy to shut up by any means. A character who is just plain out there. An unholy dead ringer of an often sane character. An inanimate object treated by characters as a real person. Fascination with hands while on drug trips. A quirky character is more effective and/or awesome because of his quirkiness. A character remembers an event so ridiculous it couldn't possibly be true. Prepared for every situation, I mean every situation. If something impossible is said to only happen if X, X will happen. Non sequitor humor tossed in for why the hell not. Confusing anti-art movement. Comics consisting of surreal, non-sequitur humor. Clothing that moves around by itself. Although they probably smell funny doing it. It's animated and totally not made on drugs, we swear. Tunneling straight through, molten core? Bah. A music sequence in a strait-laced film enters through a sudden Art Shift into Deranged Animation territory. A world comprised of dreams... or nightmares. Indie True Art film that most people don't bother even trying to understand. A big foot comes out of nowhere and stomps someone to death. Troubled people curl up and go away in their heads to places where everything is warm and fuzzy and candy corn. Just because someone evil did something doesn't make that thing evil - but people treat it like it was. A character consistently denies doing something even through incontrovertible evidence. Anything can cure poison if the plot requires it! Standard, evil plot-critical machines have that one lever/function that seems to be totally unrelated to the rest of it. A normal person wanders into a crazy place. A "scientific" device that runs on something impossible or nonsensical. It doesn't. The Epileptic Trees remain epileptic unless you possess Fridge Brilliance. When things just make no sense. Ingesting something hallucinogenic results in - whoooa! The pink fleas! My Slinky has eyes!. An innocent character who constantly creeps out those around her. Saying something random after being clobbered. An event in the past that's referenced but never explained. Talking about an un-described complicated act by describing a long list of things used in it. We know this sounds ridiculous, but we are not making this up. Void where prohibited. A Badass Boast of having killed somebody with something nobody would consider a weapon -- and then not explaining or showing how it was done. Body parts that have a mind of their own and can influence their owner's brain. Someone or something that is innately self-contradictory. Change the definition of a word to suit your purposes. An implausible and out-of-character misunderstanding. When a convincing argument causes something to stop existing. An area where the laws of physics or reality just stop applying. Making something so outrageous that it becomes acceptable, when dialed-down levels would be offensive. The villain turns into a snake or dragon. A consistent escalation in whatever the heck a work is doing. Some people just can't get over the fact that "their side" lost some conflict long ago. It's scary and it makes no sense! Wonderful! Rule of Funny A theme tune with random lyrics that has little connection to the show. This is an image. But it does not exist. Anyone can understand this tripe, it can't possibly be artistic! A visual sound effect for something that doesn't actually make that sound A strange outburst from someone who is waking up. The creator of a work outright admits it was deliberately made to confuse the audience and poke fun at their attempts to find meaning in it. Um. It's a big wave made up of babies. Yeah, I don't get it either. A person mentions something utterly weird in passing as if it were quite normal. If someone is "weird", it's acceptable that they do things that normal people couldn't get away with. There's no way someone could have come up with this when they weren't high - oh wait, they did? A city or place whose location is never revealed When someone is so attached to a hobby/inanimate thing it may as well be romantic. Weird foreign series. Take Inherently Funny Words and try and combine them to make a funny sentence. "I believe in Meaningless Meaningful Words." Nothing makes sense in this place! Argh!
 * Chewbacca Defense
 * Cloudcuckoolander
 * Cuckoolandian Counterpart
 * Companion Cube
 * Contemplating Your Hands
 * Crazy Awesome
 * Crazy Memory
 * Crazy Prepared
 * Cue the Flying Pigs
 * Cutaway Gag
 * Dada
 * Dada Comics
 * Dancing Pants
 * The Dead Can Dance
 * Deranged Animation
 * Digging to China
 * Disney Acid Sequence
 * Dream Land
 * Le Film Artistique
 * Giant Foot of Stomping
 * Happy Place
 * A Hat
 * Hitler Ate Sugar
 * Implausible Deniability
 * Improbable Antidote
 * Indecisive Medium
 * Inventional Wisdom
 * Is It Always Like This
 * It Runs On Nonsensoleum
 * Makes Just As Much Sense in Context
 * Mind Screw
 * Mushroom Samba
 * Nightmare Fuel Stationattendant
 * Non Sequitur Thud
 * Noodle Incident
 * Noodle Implements
 * Not Making This Up Disclaimer
 * Offer Void in Nebraska
 * Once Killed a Man With A Noodle Implement
 * Organ Autonomy
 * Oxymoronic Being
 * Personal Dictionary
 * Poor Communication Kills
 * Puff of Logic
 * Reality Is Out to Lunch
 * Refuge in Audacity
 * Scaled Up
 * Serial Escalation
 * Still Fighting the Civil War
 * Surreal Horror
 * Surreal Humor
 * Surreal Theme Tune
 * The Treachery of Images
 * True Art Is Incomprehensible
 * Unsound Effect
 * Waking Non Sequitur
 * The Walrus Was Paul
 * Wave of Babies
 * Weird Aside
 * Weirdness Coupon
 * What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made On Drugs
 * Where the Hell Is Springfield?
 * Why Don't You Marry It
 * Widget Series
 * Word Salad Humor
 * Word Salad Philosophy
 * World Gone Mad
 * World of Chaos