Literary nonsense
Its humor is derived from its nonsensical nature, rather than wit or the "joke" of a punch line.
[2] Literary nonsense, as recognized since the nineteenth century, comes from a combination of two broad artistic sources.
[3] The literary figure Mother Goose represents common incarnations of this style of writing.
These writers often created sophisticated nonsense forms of Latin parodies, religious travesties, and political satire, though these texts are distinguished from more pure satire and parody by their exaggerated nonsensical effects.
[5] Though not the first to write this hybrid kind of nonsense, Edward Lear developed and popularized it in his many limericks (starting with A Book of Nonsense, 1846) and other famous texts such as "The Owl and the Pussycat", "The Dong with a Luminous Nose", "The Jumblies" and "The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Around the World".
Lewis Carroll continued this trend, making literary nonsense a worldwide phenomenon with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871).
Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky", which appears in the latter book, is often considered quintessential nonsense literature.
[7] The genre is most easily recognizable by the various techniques or devices it uses to create this balance of meaning and lack of meaning, such as faulty cause and effect, portmanteau, neologism, reversals and inversions, imprecision (including gibberish), simultaneity, picture/text incongruity, arbitrariness, infinite repetition, negativity or mirroring, and misappropriation.
If there is not significant sense to balance out such devices, then the text dissolves into literal (as opposed to literary) nonsense.
[14] Light verse, which is generally speaking humorous verse meant to entertain, may share humor, inconsequentiality, and playfulness with nonsense, but it usually has a clear point or joke and does not have the requisite tension between meaning and lack of meaning.
Fantasy worlds employ the presence of magic to logically explain the impossible.
[21] Some seemingly nonsense texts are actually riddles, such as the popular 1940s song Mairzy Doats, which at first appears to have little discernible meaning but has a discoverable message.
[23] While most contemporary nonsense has been written for children, the form has an extensive history in adult configurations before the nineteenth century.
[24] Nonsense was also an important element in the works of Flann O'Brien and Eugène Ionesco.
Today, literary nonsense enjoys a shared audience of adults and children.
Some of them wrote texts considered to be in the genre (such as Lear, Carroll, Gorey, Lennon, Sandburg), while others only use nonsense as an occasional device (such as Joyce, Juster).
[26] David Byrne, of the art rock/new wave group Talking Heads, employed nonsensical techniques in songwriting.
[27] This tendency formed the basis of the title for the Talking Heads concert movie, Stop Making Sense.
More recently, Byrne published Arboretum (2006), a volume of tree-like diagrams that are "mental maps of imaginary territory".
The application of logical scientific rigor and form to basically irrational premises.
To proceed, carefully and deliberately, from nonsense, with a straight face, often arriving at a new kind of sense.
"[28] Syd Barrett, founder of Pink Floyd, was known for his often nonsensical songwriting influenced by Lear and Carroll that featured heavily on Pink Floyd's first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
[29] The cartoonist Glen Baxter's comic work is often nonsense, relying on the baffling interplay between word and image.
[30] The Tomfoolery Show was an American cartoon comedy television series based on the nonsense works of Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and others.
Zippy the Pinhead, by Bill Griffith, is an American strip that mixes philosophy, including what has been called "Heideggerian disruptions",[31] and pop culture in its nonsensical processes.
After the release the public thought the lyrics contained a real riddle, and MCA marketing went along with it, creating widespread fruitless speculation.
"Edward Lear's Limericks and Their Illustrations" in Explorations in the Field of Nonsense, ed.
