Existentialist Jokes for People Who Have Read the Footnotes
- Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is often described as surreal. I disagree. Gregor Samsa wakes up physically transformed, immediately worries about missing work, and receives no meaningful assistance from his family. That is realism.
- Hamlet spent five acts asking whether he should exist. The rest of us have meetings, so the question has largely been settled for us.
- “To be or not to be” sounds profound until you realize Hamlet is standing in a castle where absolutely no one has considered therapy, locks, or competent succession planning.
- Camus said we must imagine Sisyphus happy. This is easier if we imagine the boulder as an email marked “Quick question.”
- Sisyphus finally reached the top of the hill.
“Excellent work,” the gods said. “We’ve incorporated your progress into our next update.” - Kafka’s The Trial begins with a man arrested for an unspecified crime by an inaccessible authority. Today we call that “contacting customer support.”
- Josef K. asked what he had been accused of. The court told him the information was available in the portal.
- Gregor Samsa’s real mistake was not turning into an insect. It was failing to say he was dressed up for Comic Con.
- Dostoevsky’s Underground Man had free will, intelligence, spite, and unlimited time to think. Naturally, he used all four to ruin dinner.
- The Underground Man is what happens when self-awareness develops faster than social skills.
- Raskolnikov believed extraordinary people could transcend ordinary morality. Unfortunately, he tested the theory before checking whether he was extraordinary.
- Dostoevsky created characters who debate God, freedom, guilt, and human suffering for hundreds of pages. Then someone inherits money, and suddenly everyone becomes practical.
- Ivan Karamazov returned his ticket to God. The clerk explained that metaphysical objections were nonrefundable.
- Nietzsche stared into the abyss. The abyss stared back and said, “You’re overthinking this.”
- Nietzsche announced that God was dead. Kafka asked whether the appropriate form had been submitted before his PTO.
- Sartre said hell is other people. Introverts quietly wondered why this required a play.
- Sartre ordered coffee without cream.
“We’re out of cream,” said the waiter. “Would you like it without milk instead?”
Sartre realized that absence, too, had categories. - No Exit teaches us that eternal damnation requires neither flames nor demons. Three articulate people in one room will do.
- Beckett’s characters waited endlessly for Godot. Modern readers find this baffling because we now have delivery tracking and can watch nothing approach in real time.
- Vladimir: “What are we doing here?”
Estragon: “Waiting.”
Vladimir: “For meaning?”
Estragon: “No, the meeting host hasn’t admitted us yet.” - Godot never arrives because he saw how long the play was and exercised his free will to avoid it.
- Melville’s Bartleby said, “I would prefer not to,” and accidentally articulated the most complete philosophy ever developed for replying to a calendar invitation.
- Bartleby did not reject capitalism through revolution. He simply stopped cooperating until his local municipality embraced metaphysical rights.
- Captain Ahab crossed the world to confront the creature onto which he had projected all human evil. The whale, meanwhile, had no idea it was involved in a symbolic dispute.
- Moby-Dick is the story of a man whose inability to process one bad experience becomes everyone else’s travel nightmare.
- Ahab had purpose, conviction, leadership, and a clear strategic objective. This is why purpose, conviction, leadership, and clear strategic objectives should occasionally be reviewed by someone sane. That does not include today’s leadership.
- Don Quixote saw giants where other people saw windmills. Today he would call that visionary leadership and obtain seed funding.
- Sancho Panza followed Don Quixote because he had been promised an island. Every absurd human enterprise begins with someone being promised equity.
- Victor Frankenstein created conscious life, abandoned it immediately, and then acted surprised when the project developed stakeholder claims.
- Frankenstein’s creature asked his creator why he had been made. Victor responded by leaving the conversation, establishing a durable precedent for senior leadership.
- Dorian Gray sold his soul to remain young. Modernity found the arrangement inefficient and invented GLP-1.
- Oscar Wilde understood that life is too important to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, my life continues to schedule itself as if it were extremely important.
- Ivan Ilyich spent his life doing everything society considered correct. On his deathbed, he discovered that society would not be attending.
- Tolstoy’s characters search for the meaning of life through war, marriage, religion, agriculture, adultery, and several hundred pages of Russian winter. The meaning of life keeps needs a parka and warm mittens.
- Anna Karenina wanted love to justify existence. Existence declined to assume that level of responsibility.
- Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. She had considered asking the universe, but its procurement process was notoriously slow.
- Virginia Woolf proved that an ordinary walk across London can contain memory, death, class, love, empire, and the terrifying possibility that one has forgotten something at the shop.
- Prufrock asked, “Do I dare disturb the universe?” The universe had muted notifications on.
- Dante entered a dark wood midway through life and found himself lost. Contemporary scholars identify this as the earliest recorded performance review.
- Dante organized hell into nine circles because even eternal suffering benefits from a clear reporting structure.
- The worst circle of hell is not in Dante. It is reserved for people who reply “Interesting” after you have explained your deepest fear.
- Oedipus devoted himself to uncovering the truth. Sophocles devoted himself to demonstrating why this should not become a habit.
- The Oracle told Oedipus his fate in advance. Oedipus then spent years making independent decisions that displayed remarkable alignment with the forecast.
- King Lear divided his kingdom according to which daughter praised him most convincingly. Four hundred years later, we call this an executive compensation or university exit committee.
- Macbeth asked whether the dagger before him was real. The dagger declined to comment during pending litigation.
- Lady Macbeth said, “What’s done cannot be undone.” Every attorney in the room slowly turned toward the document-retention policy.
- Achilles was offered a long obscure life or a short glorious one. He chose glory, thereby demonstrating that personal branding has always had a body count.
- Odysseus spent ten years trying to get home, repeatedly delaying his arrival to explain how urgently he needed to get home.
- The ancient Greeks believed hubris angered the gods. We replaced the gods with consequences and became much less attentive.
- The Book of Ecclesiastes says everything is meaningless. It then continues for twelve chapters, because meaninglessness is no excuse for submitting incomplete work.
- Job demanded that God explain his suffering. God responded with questions about meteorology, zoology, and the foundations of the Earth. This remains the most prestigious recorded instance of changing the subject.
- Dr. Faustus exchanged his soul for unlimited knowledge. He then discovered that unlimited knowledge includes knowing exactly how badly one negotiated.
- Faust wanted to experience everything. This is the sort of goal that sounds impressive until “everything” begins arriving via Amazon.
- Robinson Crusoe escaped society and immediately started recreating property law.
- Gulliver visited societies of tiny people, giants, scientists, politicians, and intelligent horses. He returned convinced humanity was intolerable, which suggests travel did broaden his perspective.
- Poe’s narrator insists he is not mad, which is literature’s traditional way of asking the reader to move valuables out of reach.
- “All happy families are alike,” Tolstoy wrote. Unhappy families produce better publishing contracts.
- Existentialism asks whether life has inherent meaning. Classic literature replies, “Probably not, but wait until you hear what the family has been hiding.”
