Odd then, that few movements in literary history seem less fitted to the swaggering USA then Absurdism. For one thing, there is the frigid, Olympian detachment and cosmic despair, products of hardship we have only read about in Time-Life books. Then there is the ultra-sophisticated sense of humor, the philosophical wit and existential burlesque which, again, we have only read about in other Time-Life books. Most of all there are the writers, titans like Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, whom we rarely read at all.

The recent success of the Theatre de Complicité's brilliant production of Ionesco's The Chairs, though, suggests that there may indeed be a market for Absurdism in these United States! Why not? Who likes a gag more than we do? And it's not as if we have no precedents, either. There are the Marx Brothers, Apollo 13, Stanley Milgram's famous experiment, and of course John Saunders and Joe Giella's sublime Mary Worth.

Mary Worth? How did that prim spinster get in this boat? Well, readers who think they can dismiss Mary as indistinguishable from such serial dreck as Brenda Starr or Apartment 3-G had better think again. Mary Worth is a classic two-panel absurdist play, in which two or three characters exchange cryptic intelligences to the amazement of one of them in the iambic second panel. While these discourses appear to make sense, they in fact impart no information to the reader, who is left to marvel as the inscrutability of the cosmos. The same conversations often are stretched over weeks, with each day's concluding panel showing the same amazed or dismayed reaction. Mary Worth is essentially about the pointlessness of humanity, or what Mad Magazine used to call, in its satires of Modern Art, "man's inhumanity to man."