13 April 2005

American absurdism

The Simpleton tells us that Mary Worth comics are heir to the absurdist literary tradition.

Mary Worth is a classic two-panel absurdist play, in which two or three characters exchange cryptic intelligences to the amazement of one of them in the iambic second panel. While these discourses appear to make sense, they in fact impart no information to the reader, who is left to marvel as the inscrutability of the cosmos.

Who knew?