The Bhagavad Gita & Absurdist Comedy

I laugh in the face of mortality (or at least nervously chuckle)

avyaktādīni bhūtāni vyakta-madhyāni bhārata
avyakta-nidhanānyeva tatra kā paridevanā

Before birth, the body is invisible. After death, again, the body becomes invisible. Only in the interim the body is seen. Why grieve for what is temporary?
The wise regard all this as if it were a dream.

-Bhagavad Gita 2.28

“No one really knew what was real and not real half the time… you just went with Andy and Tony wherever their whim took you… and the emotions were often really real.”

-Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond – Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton (2017)

One day during class, my teacher stopped carefully guiding us through the inscrutable Sanskrit verses to translate what we had just chanted. He told the class, whose average age hovers in the elementary school range, in the most cheerful, yet neutral voice possible: “What is born must die. Everything. Not just humans, any thing that is alive will eventually die. The soul doesn’t die though, just our bodies.” None of the children seemed shocked or worried by this. They didn’t seem to be thinking about their beloved dogs and cats, or the fact that this meant that their parents would die. Or that they would die. They seem bored. Which was good. Better that than traumatized by a tactless Indian uncle on a Zoom call. When I think back to my own childhood self, I suppose I thought about death in the same detached way that these kids did. It wasn’t that I hadn’t known people who died. Death just didn’t seem as final or as taboo as it did when my Christian friends talked about it. It felt more like a dream, or a place where things went quiet, like the sudden stopping of rain as your car passed through a tunnel. But the older I got, the less certain I became of which one was the dream: death or life. Even before a global pandemic made us start fearing handshakes and wiping down our lemons, life as an adult felt full of contradictions, irrational tendencies, and unbelievable scenarios. In other words, absurd.

I have always been a lover of fantastical and nonsensical media. As a kid, it manifested in The Muppets, early YouTube animation, and The Labyrinth. As I got older, it became wrapped up in my love of magical realism, David Lynch, and, once again, YouTube animation. This love of the absurd crystalized most clearly in my fascination with socially disruptive and alternative comedy. There’s a kind of gleeful terror in watching comedians like Andy Kaufman, Sacha Baron Cohen, Eric Andre, and others whose comedy moves beyond the boundaries of a typical stand-up set or late night show. I’m entranced by the flashy theatrics, while simultaneously being reminded that the careful world order we’ve constructed is just a hair away from colorful collapse. When I see Eric Andre spill cake onto subway commuters while dressed as a centaur in The Eric Andre Show, or watch Nathan Fielder lead a group of hapless people up a mountain to get a $7 rebate on gas in Nathan For You, I can’t help but laugh at how easy it is to disrupt our lives. While I’m entertained by their antics, they also conjure the feelings of otherness and confusion that I’ve faced in my life. These absurd intrusions can be little, like the time an older man complimented me on my American accent, even though I was born and raised in Indiana. Or they can be world-shaking, like when the United States elected a celebrity bigot to be president and then that same bigot incited a riot in which a man adorned in viking horns and other strangely belligerent people stormed the Capitol. In the face of such bewildering circumstances, it starts to feel like the solid world you’ve known your whole life is actually a green screen with cheap effects. You look around and wonder, “Is anyone else seeing this?”

No one likes to feel that their normal reality could be challenged, especially people who are sheltered from daily uncertainty by their positions of power and privilege. There’s a reason that Sacha Baron Cohen has faced multiple lawsuits from senators and frat boys alike. There’s also a reason that shows like the Rehearsal have whole series of articles dedicated solely to their ethics. Absurd work poses a threat to our ordered world and blurs the lines of reality, forcing us to question what we can deem solid and immutable and what is just an illusion. For all the faults of these men, I feel like they are some of the only people who have a shot at revealing a truth about our human existence that we try our best to ignore: that the borders between fact and fiction, comedy and tragedy, and even life and death, are much more tenuous than we realize.

In the documentary Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond, Jim Carrey recounts the making of one of his most iconic and bizarre roles: Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon. My parents loved that movie when I was growing up. It was one of those movies that I saw so often and so early in my childhood that it feels more like a dream or faded memory. I always wondered what they loved about it. It’s not goofy like Ace Ventura or campy like the Mask. It’s not traditionally funny like Dumb and Dumber or an indie darling like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Instead, it’s the biopic of a comedian whose style was so provocative and idiosyncratic that he became a curio of an era rather than a comedic grandfather. There must have been something special, something more magical in this one Jim Carrey movie that made it so well-loved in my house. When I watched the documentary with my parents in college, I soon discovered why. The trailers for Jim and Andy on Netflix portrayed Man on the Moon as an experiment in method acting gone horribly sideways. The promotional video promised never-before-seen footage from the film set that showed Jim Carrey completely lost in the character of Andy Kaufman, crashing cars and drunkenly stumbling into his trailer with a paper bag over his head. While the actual movie provided plenty of that, it was what Carrey said, more than what he did, that left the biggest impact on me.

In an interview at the beginning of the movie, Jim says, “When I heard I had the part (of Andy Kaufman), I was sitting in Malibu looking at the ocean and thinking, where would Andy be? What would he be doing? I bet he would be trying to communicate telepathically… I decided then for the next few days to speak telepathically to people. It was absurd. Completely absurd. But it worked. That’s the moment when Andy Kaufman showed up, tapped me on the shoulder, and said, ‘sit down, I’ll be doing my movie.’ What happened afterwards was out of my control.”

I love the matter-of-fact tone he uses when he says “telepathically,” and the sincere belief he has that one person could swap in for another. A passage in the Bhagavad Gita reads, “Before birth, the body is invisible. After death, again, the body becomes invisible. Only in the interim the body is seen. Why grieve for what is temporary? The wise regard all this as if it were a dream.” Jim acts as if his life is just a mask for something grander— the body invisible until it is given form in life, then made invisible again in death. In this role, Jim not only crossed the boundaries of personhood, but death itself. In a particularly moving scene, Andy Kaufman’s family visits the set. They talk to Jim, playing Andy’s congas and reminiscing about old times. Everyone says the same thing: being with Jim feels like Andy’s alive again.

At one point, Andy’s sister hugs Jim, crying, and Jim says, still in Andy’s voice, “I think this movie’s going to be a celebration and healing for everybody.” Andy’s sister Carol tells him fondly, “and for you too. For us.”

There’s a reason that the absurd stirs real emotions in us, why it can help process the much more “serious” parts of life. The absurd shows the universe in all its chaos, in all its unity, demonstrating that even death and life are just a trick in a skilled performer’s toolkit. Krishna, in the second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, tells Arjuna, “Before wearing these bodies, we were the soul. When these bodies perish, we will again remain as the soul. What dies is the body, not the soul.” Absurdist work can help us remember that ultimately, this is all temporary. The worries that hang over our heads, the fights we pick, the stakes we raise, all pale in comparison to the grandeur of the universe. And we are lucky just to experience it for the brief time we are given, before our soul takes on its next starring role.

There is a sense that absurd comedians like Carrey, Kaufman, Fielder, and other magicians are sociopaths who don’t value anything, and therefore treat the world like a plaything. It’s understandable. When you watch Nathan Fielder toy with a grieving person’s emotions surrounding their dead grandfather on the Rehearsal, or you hear Andy Kaufman talk about women being inferior in every way, you wonder if there is a compassionate person behind the whole facade. And yet, the absurd scenarios that these comedians create often produce the most authentic moments of human empathy, as people reach out to one another to weather the chaotic storm.

Earlier, I mentioned the episode of Nathan For You in which Nathan Fielder advises a struggling gas station to sell gas at $1.75 a gallon by offering a rebate, but only if the customer is willing to hike to the top of a mountain and solve a series of riddles to get to the rebate deposit box. The episode unfolds in a Survivor-esque manner with confessionals from the rebate hikers and moments of vulnerability in which frustrated customers yell at Nathan or simply quit the mission. Every so often, the screen displays the rebate amount that each hiker is desperately seeking. Most of them are between 13 and 27 dollars. It’s easy to laugh at people who have nothing better to do than spend a whole day hiking a mountain to get the equivalent dollar amount of a fancy grilled cheese. Then, night falls and the rebate seekers set up camp. Over the course of the night, they share stories about their lives, involving tales of love lost and dreams gone awry. They laugh and hug one another, and while it could just be the TV editing, they seem to genuinely have fun. In one of the most bizarre scenarios a person could find themselves in, these strangers become friends. In just one scene, I went from pitying these cheapskates to wanting to be one of them.

I don’t think Nathan could have predicted these fast bonds, and I doubt it was his intention to make an episode about unlikely friendship, but I also don’t think it surprised him. Sometimes, treating the human world as a plaything means that you invite people to play along with you, and in that unbridled joy, there can be a sense of liberation. Not only that, but it can prepare us for when reality goes sideways, showing us that leaning into the skids and laughing at our folly can make us more resilient in times of grief, confusion, and fear. While the Bhagavad Gita advises the wise to regard this all as a dream, it also reminds us that our connection to one another is very real. Later on in the sixth chapter, Krishna describes the interconnection of all living creatures, saying that we are like gems on a string. We are connected by the fact that we all must learn to live in a tumultuous world, one plagued by ego, desire, and suffering: the standard existence package. Perhaps most importantly, we are connected by the divine— a universal connection between all living things. Krishna advises Arjuna, “I consider him the highest, who treats the happiness of all creatures as his own happiness, and the sorrows of all as his own sorrow.” We are battered about by a hilariously chaotic world, and in recognizing our common struggle within that mess, maybe we can live with more ease. And if it takes a man lip syncing Mighty Mouse to get us there, then so be it.

Bonus: This amazing interview with Eric Andre about doing a prank show while honoring people’s humanity