A dose of the absurd can help make sense of our place in the world

As I cleared out the shove-it-all-in cupboard over the weekend, joining 93 per cent of Brits on their annual spring clean, I came across an object that I couldn’t bear to throw away.

And, as I held it in my arms, I was right back in the moment when it became mine.

It was December 2023, and just two things stood between me and the life-size cuddly banana of my dreams – a stack of empty tin cans on a shelf, and the accuracy of my husband’s last throw. We were at Winter Wonderland, I had enjoyed the full Bavarian meal-deal, I had compromised on a beige-knuckle ride, and now my heart was set on the biggest prize the fairground stalls had to offer.

He shot. He scored. With his ego intact, he proudly handed me my prize - one of the most bizarre objects I have ever seen. Five foot long. The shape of a banana. The colour of a cucumber. Acid-trippy eyes. Velvet skin. A huge smile. An adorable little knitted scarf that wrapped around his neck. I christened him Benny the Banana, and it was time to take him home.

I assumed I would be the envy of the younger travellers on the tube, but the reaction that Benny the Banana received as I carried him down the escalators was astonishing. Nobody could take their eyes off him. Young, old, every background, every consumer segment. Cameras emerged. Videos were taken. Benny wasn’t just a big banana. He was a star. I played along. In the carriage I found Benny a seat to himself and made him comfortable. As laughter filled the air I realised (even as a lifelong Londoner who has seen some pretty mad shit on the tube) I had never seen a trainload look more communally delighted. Laughing, joking, talking to each other, and pointing. All down to the power of my big banana.

And that got me to thinking…in a world where our lives are more predictable, and where our algorithmic experience of culture is honed to our expectations, the impact of The Absurd is stronger than ever. Behaviourally, humans are pattern seekers. Its why crushing those candies on tile-matching mobile games is so deeply satisfying. It’s why Mozart’s children were able to use the trick of playing incomplete scales on the piano to force him to get out of bed and complete them.

When something is deliberately, obtusely, out of place, it grabs us and holds our attention. From the bizarre metal Martians who sold us instant mashed potato, to the deliberately grammatically incorrect but iconic Apple line, “Think different,” Adland has always known the value of using a bit of ‘wrong’ to get things right.

But I felt there was something deeper going on than that. As Benny the Banana was the recipient of mirth from such a big mix of Londoners it reminded me that the power of The Absurd is greater than simply distinctiveness.

When Eugene Ionesco wrote Rhinoceros, an Absurdist play about a small French town where an enormous Rhino appears and starts a contagion of townspeople becoming Rhinos themselves, it struck a chord with post-war Europe. It was a time when people were coming to terms with the impact of the rise of fascism and how people like them, including those in the audience, had let it spread just a few years earlier. But the really interesting thing about the play was not its immediate success, it was its ongoing relevance. It has been performed thousands of times, in hundreds of global cities and has frequently been called ‘the play of our times’, at vastly different times.

You see, the thing about The Absurd is that it doesn’t merely create ‘stand out’ – it creates just enough distance for projection. Its superpower is its lack of specificity. When nobody sees themselves directly in a story, there is space for everyone to see themselves.

There’s a word that shows up in nearly every client brief today – relevance. Naturally so. Brands want to be seen as a “brand for me” by as many buyers as possible. It’s a metric I’ve always found useful. But I can’t help thinking that how we seek relevance has become a bit literal and underplays one of humanity’s greatest strengths – to relate to each other on a deeper and more universal level. To connect with the world, we don’t always need to hold up a mirror to it.

When human beings can find a universal connection with a big Banana, contagious Rhinos, and potato loving Martians, perhaps sometimes, the best way to get close to people is actually to move a little further away.