The role of absurdity within English humour

Utilizing a range of critical and theoretical approaches ranging from anthropology to psychoanalysis, it is this book’s intention to identify and elucidate an absurdist sensibility within the modern comedy of Vic Reeves Big Night Out, Brass Eye and The Office. By employing intellectual sources and comic theories ranging from Freud, Esslin, Camus and Beckett to Koestler, Bergson, Palmer and Critchley, this study aims to examine how these three diverse comedies rejection of the played with, yet ultimately reaffirmed logic of traditional comedy serves to articulate a feeling of the absurd condition whilst expressing the sentiment that perhaps all does not make sense.