Dark Humour, Dreams, and Myth: The Semiotics of Absurd Meaning

Dark Humour, Dreams, and Myth: The Semiotics of Absurd Meaning

Myths have always helped humanity navigate the unknown, translating the chaos of existence into stories of gods, monsters, and fate. But what happens when modernity strips the world of mythic certainty? When science dissolves ancient cosmologies, and rationality leaves us staring into the existential abyss?

Enter dark humour, dreams, and absurdity—the mythic tools of our time.

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Dark Humour as Modern Myth-Making

Dark humour is a test of meaning-making. It plays with the taboo, the absurd, and the unsettling—but in doing so, it often reveals deeper truths, much like myth.

1. The Semiotics of Dark Humour

Dark humour thrives on subverted meaning potential:

• Incongruity: It forces us to reconcile contradictions (e.g., discussing death in a flippant tone).

• Defamiliarisation: It makes the world strange, forcing us to re-evaluate meaning.

• Mythic Resonance: Like myth, it deals with existential themes—death, fate, suffering, absurdity—but in a modern, often satirical context.

2. Dark Humour and the Mythic Function

Campbell’s four mythic functions—mystical, cosmological, sociological, pedagogical—are all at play in dark humour.

Dark humour often does what myth used to do—help us process the unthinkable.

3. The Absurd, Death, and the Void

Dark humour aligns with existentialism and absurdism:

• Camus' absurdity: The realisation that life has no inherent meaning.

• Beckettian humour: Waiting for meaning that never arrives.

• Nietzschean laughter: Staring into the abyss and laughing anyway.

Myths once structured human mortality, offering narratives of the afterlife. Dark humour deconstructs this certainty, replacing it with the punchline: "It’s all meaningless! Haha!"

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The Semiotics of Dreams: Myth in the Private Mind

If dark humour is myth for the collective, dreams are myth for the individual.

1. Campbell, Myth, and the Dreaming Mind

Campbell called myths "public dreams" and dreams "private myths." This means:

• Both construct meaning from disparate fragments.

• Both involve symbolic compression—a single image (a god, a joke, a nightmare) condenses layers of meaning.

• Both are structured through narrative yet operate in a logic outside rational discourse.

2. The Semiotic Structure of Dreams

Dreams have a textual quality:

• Signs become unstable. (A mother might also be a shadow, a city might dissolve into water.)

• Time and space are fluid. (A dream can compress lifetimes into seconds.)

• Absurdity reigns. (A talking fish might deliver wisdom more profound than a philosopher.)

Dreams, like myths, teach us that meaning is not fixed but emerges through relational context.