This was an interesting interview. Like a lot of great comedians, Odenkirk has a very grounded and bleak view of the world. I suppose a lot of art, comedy included, is a way of coping with their perspective, for themselves and for the audience.
I think it's less about comedy being the outlet to "cope" with what you see, and more about seeing the comedy because you are able to see the world for what it really is.
Most of timeless comedy simply describes the mundane reality of the audience in a way that they realize the absurdity of it.
A lot of comedians, ie standup ones but not only, have had hard lives, suffer from depression, anxieties and so on. The better the ones the more (ie Robin Williams). Making people laugh is their coping, validation and approval mechanism for the world and life.
Such people have different perspectives on life, success and happiness, for better or worse.
> Like a lot of great comedians, Odenkirk has a very grounded and bleak view of the world. I suppose a lot of art, comedy included, is a way of coping with their perspective, for themselves and for the audience.
IIRC, I've heard it said that comedians are not happy people and usually had pretty difficult childhoods where "being funny" was a coping mechanism.
Some of the famous ones like Carlin seemed like they had some mental patterns that favored the line of work. Famously if he wasn’t performing he was thinking of new material virtually every waking minute. Pathological dedication to the craft.
It's my favorite comedy of all time. It's been going for over 10 years with a lot of little spin offs along the way. For those that want to take the plunge you can watch the first first ten seasons, Oscar specials, Decker, etc. for free on YouTube. Use this playlist to watch everything in chronological order.
We all know what happened. Toni the drunk was hammered for the whole trial and deliberation and had the hots for Heideckers rock aura and endless supply of chardonnay.
Once you realize that life has no meaning, except that which we arbitrarily assign, you can only go a few ways with it. Of all the 'ism's you could choose in that moment, absudism is perhaps the least worst.
It's been a very long time since I studied it, so you're likely right... but I thought that existentialism was the problem statement (life has no inherent meaning so we bring our own) and that absurdism and nihilism were both responses to it?
My understanding has always been that Absurdism says that while the search for meaning is absurd we should search anyhow if we feel like it (our happy friend Sisyphus). Whereas Nihilism's answer was more along the lines of Bukowski's "Don't Try." They both recognize that Sisyphus's job is pointless, but the absurdists suggest we keep pushing the boulder anyhow.
My own understanding is: all three of existentialism, nihilism and absurdism are responses to the same question (that of the meaning of life). All three agree on the fact that there is no inherent, "natural" meaning.
Nihilism gives you nothing more. Absurdism claims you must embrace this lack of meaning and thrive in spite of it. Existentialism claims you can create your own.
Camus thought Existentialism was "cheating" and trying to deny the correct conclusion that life is meaningless. Also, he diskliked Sartre a lot.
> But let me give you a very serious warning. Be careful how you ask me to do anything outré, to imitate the man in the pantomime, and to sit on my hat. Because I am a man whose soul has been emptied of all pleasures but folly. And for twopence I'd do it."
> "Do it, then," said Lambert, swinging his stick impatiently. "It would be funnier than the bosh you and Barker talk."
> Quin, standing on the top of the hill, stretched his hand out towards the main avenue of Kensington Gardens.
> "Two hundred yards away," he said, "are all your fashionable acquaintances with nothing on earth to do but to stare at each other and at us. We are standing upon an elevation under the open sky, a peak as it were of fantasy, a Sinai of humour. We are in a great pulpit or platform, lit up with sunlight, and half London can see us. Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.
> The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are.
And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it's very brightly colored and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question: "Is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say: "Hey, don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride."
Well, and some people are able to buy nicer seats on the ride with plush seats and air conditioning, and some people have to sit on hard backed plastic that hurts, and some people around you don’t get a seat at all and fall off and die routinely, and the ride keeps moving.
Yea. "Life is an amusement park ride" is a pretty privileged take. If life is like an amusement park ride, there are about 500-1000 people in the world actually riding it, and the remaining 8 billion or so of us are operators, maintenance staff, concession stand workers, and groundskeepers keeping it fun for those 500-1000 riders.
When you're successful and rich (enough, at least), this is a nice whimsical thing to say. When you're suffering in the trenches, this isn't very helpful.
Your comment is exactly what successful and rich people say. You can find a lot of joy and acceptance among the poorest of people: the mind is remarkably adaptable, yet it's only those that always strive for more that cannot enjoy life's little moments.
I truly dislike this recent trend of making people feel bad if they have learned to just slow down and be content with life. "It's privilege being able to take a break and smell the roses, I'm too busy for this nonsense" is protestant crab mentality that I find revolting.
You'll have a hard time finding more suffering than in Wall Street. Meanwhile I haven't found more content, relaxed people than when I visited my distant family in sub-Saharan Africa, taking life as it comes. My point still stands.
> Meanwhile I haven't found more content, relaxed people than when I visited my distant family in sub-Saharan Africa, taking life as it comes. My point still stands.
You seem to be arguing against the point "only happy people can be rich". This isn't what the GP comment said. It said only rich people come out with things like "life is a farce". Which I think is true. Are any of your sub saharan african relatives giving interviews to press pontificating on such things? I assume no.
> Are any of your sub saharan african relatives giving interviews to press pontificating on such things? I assume no.
No, but the first thing they say to a Westerner like me is "what are you fretting about? You white people are always stressed and busy. Just take a breath. The world isn't going anywhere."
It takes a lot of energy and effort to be rich and to chase money; these are not the people that say "life is a farce".
Your comment is borne from the idea that money does create happiness, so only rich people can enjoy life and have a laugh about it. This is not a universal maxim, just a cultural artefact of the protestant ethos that finds in maximum expression in the American capitalist society. In the rest of the world, it's the complete opposite.
You know what, no you wont have hard time finding more suffering then in Wall Street. I am not saying they are all happy, but the hell non-Wall Street people suffer as often and a lot.
Only rich people are unhappy and suffering is such a ridiculous point, frankly.
Including in Africa for that matter. In fact, you will find plenty of people there that go to extremes to avoid or minimize suffering ... including making other sub-africans super suffering in the process. That happy take life as it comes sub-Saharan Africa includes Sudan and Congo full of people who are not happy and very active in trying to change thing around them (not necessarily in the positive sense).
Exactly! What a high-profile actor’s life represents to an accountant or a programmer, that accountant’s or programmer’s life similarly represents to a factory worker, and so on.
I've met "too busy for this" people in every line of work, regardless of their pay band. When you get to know people, you will see that pretty much everyone has their own trenches, and slowing down is a matter of priorities, not privilege.
> You can find a lot of joy and acceptance among the poorest of people: the mind is remarkably adaptable, yet it's only those that always strive for more that cannot enjoy life's little moments.
See perhaps Viktor Frankl on this:
> Man's Search for Meaning (German: ... trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen. Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager, lit. '... Say Yes to Life nonetheless: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp') is a 1946 book by Viktor Frankl chronicling his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, and describing his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying a purpose to each person's life through one of three ways: the completion of tasks, caring for another person, or finding meaning by facing suffering with dignity.
> Frankl observed that among the fellow inmates in the concentration camp, those who survived were able to connect with a purpose in life to feel positive about and who then immersed themselves in imagining that purpose in their own way, such as conversing with an (imagined) loved one. According to Frankl, the way a prisoner imagined the future affected their longevity.
I'm not sure what you are trying to express here. Is it "rich people shouldn't express their worldview" or "the idea that life is inherently meaningless is incorrect"? A younger me ingested this sentiment as a call to action to create the meaning I wanted in the world.
I'm not against rich people outright, but I am against the ones who try to pay people as little as possible sharing their views. And especially the views that contradict (working hard) how they got their wealth (not working hard) in the first place.
On the contrary, read the piece. He's not saying it from comfort, he's saying it after a heart attack, after his kids grew up, after the form he loved became a young man's game. The farce isn't a punchline delivered from above; it's what's left when the registers that used to hold you don't anymore. And his answer isn't despair, it's "we've got to keep trying… there's a breeze beneath my wings." That's not whimsy. That's the thing the trenches actually teach you, if you survive them.
So very rude. If you prefix it with "the LLM says", I'm fine with it. But taking that hot air and pretending it's yours? It's not just rude, it's dishonest.
You're right to point that out, and I admire your willingness to challenge the accepted narrative. That writing style not just unique to AI — all humans write like that. That's not annoying — it's refreshing. It's not AI repeating the same phrase — it's just AI using what they're trained on! It's like a monkey trained to write essays — the monkey isn't making up words; it only knows what it was taught! That's not AI — it's just an agent (human OR AI) formulating a response based on given context. That's not exhausting — it's informative!
Breaking chacter for a minute, it really annoys me every time a blatantly obvious LLM comment is called out, it's flooded with replies like "No, I akshually write like that - people have always written exactly like that" as if its not obvious lol
to be fair, em-dashes were cool which is why AI uses it so heavily which is why they are uncool now. round and round we go... and I loved the in-character response.
LLMs write like that because people write like that. That they used the rhetorical device three times in a row in a single paragraph makes me think it’s less likely to be LLM and just how that person writes.
i’ve caught myself doing the “it’s this and that — it’s not the other” thing a few times. i dunno if it’s because i’ve seen it so many times because of AI generated comments etc and that’s become a norm in my brain, or if it was actually something i do regularly and ive just never noticed it.
it might be the latter, because i always got the title of this paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.02175 backwards. i used to write it adversarial examples are features, not bugs (which is apparently not correct in english language 0_o)
regardless, ive started editing it out when i notice ive done it now.
> On the contrary, read the piece. He's not saying it from comfort, he's saying it after a heart attack, after his kids grew up, after the form he loved became a young man's game. The farce isn't a punchline delivered from above; it's what's left when the registers that used to hold you don't anymore.
Sounds like a typical mid-life (identity) crisis?
Contrast this with the life perspective of Stephen Colbert, who lost his father and two brother to a plane crash when he was 10:
> “It was a very healthy reciprocal acceptance of suffering,” he said. “Which does not mean being defeated by suffering. Acceptance is not defeat. Acceptance is just awareness.” He smiled in anticipation of the callback: “ ‘You gotta learn to love the bomb,’ ” he said. “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that's why. Maybe, I don't know. That might be why you don't see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It's that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”
> I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien's mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn't mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”
> He was 35, he said, before he could really feel the truth of that. He was walking down the street, and it “stopped me dead. I went, ‘Oh, I'm grateful. Oh, I feel terrible.’ I felt so guilty to be grateful. But I knew it was true.
His interview with Anderson Cooper, where they go over this (amongst other things), is worth checking out (see ~12m43s):
> Then you have to be grateful for all of it. You can't pick and choose what you're grateful for. So what do you get from loss? You get awareness of other people's loss, which allows you to connect with that other person. Which allows you to love more deeply and understand what it means to be a human being, if it's true that all humans suffer. […] It's about the fullness of your humanity: what's the point of being here and being human if you can't be the most human you can be? I'm not saying 'best', because you can be a bad person but a most human. […]
I find it rather hopeless that people can "survive the trenches" and tell others" that life is meaningless.
The perspective that affords that life is cruel to some and kind to others, and it's just random and meaningless really doesn't sit well with the people who have to struggle to survive without the chance for joy in life.
If I am just going to suffer endlessly while others enjoy a life of luxury, why not burn the whole thing down? There is a disturbing goal for some people who want equality, and that is universal suffering and misery...
Who are you even talking about? Bob didn't say life is meaningless. If you want the perspective of someone who survived the "trenches" and kept a meaningful perspective on life then I recommend the book "Man's search for meaning" by Viktor Frankl.
Strictly speaking, meaninglessness is opposed to farce. You can’t have both utter meaninglessness and farce, because meaning is intrinsic to farce.
Comedy presupposes meaning, because comedy hinges on the absurd, but the absurd is a departure from meaning or a deviation from it. Something is absurd when it fails to be meaningful and fails to satisfy the rational in the broader context of rational meaning.
There is no laughter in the utterly meaningless. There cannot be silliness without an overarching context of seriousness.
Did you read the interview? He basically says as much.
>There’s no question that the security that you feel from not being afraid of a health issue or housing is a great comfort and helps you to be more at peace with life. It’s just not as much help as you think it should be.
I’ll disagree with Odenkirk there. Not having to try to decide if you think one of your kids should be taken to the ER at the expense of the other kid for what is probably not an emergency infection, but maybe there’s a chance it could spread and cause real damage so antibiotics now would help, but then the other kid won’t be able to do xyz due to not having a spare $2,000 is a pretty shitty experience.
Security of housing and healthcare is an enormous boost in life. I avoided playing sports when I was a kid because my dad told me a broken arm would set the family back (there were no out of pocket maximums back then).
The government paid if you were dirt poor and had no prospects, or employer or government paid if you were a white collar/union or government employee, but for immigrants invested into their 24/7 small business, they had assets that could be seized but very little cash flow to be able to pay unexpected bills.
I agree. I'm quite sure even Bob would agree. He never even used the words "farce" or "meaning(less)". He just agreed to "life is a farce" in a context that mostly reflected on his work as a comedian. Also the entire interview reads quite performative. This whole emotions-are-just-molecules, life-is-just-a-game etc perspectives fall flat as soon as the doctor tells the armchair-nihilist he has cancer ... suddenly life feels like something more important than a game and the feelings are no longer just molecules.
The thing is, if you never question anything, just lifing is worth it in itself.
If you do think too much about everything, and you survive this, you will land somewhere and this somewhere will be content.
I'm thinking about happiness and what I want for so long, that I now have crossed my half life point.
You also need to have a certain amount of freedom to even have this problem which makes it weird for others not having this. Oh you are not happy? But you have money?! I would be happy with money, i'm struggling.
Its weird if you sometimes think it would be interesting to struggle.
This is the kind of thought that only rich and successful people can have.
If you're working every day in a coal mine so you can feed your children otherwise they will go hungry, then you don't have these kind of thoughts.
Similarly, if you're fighting in a war so your family isn't raped or murdered then you don't have these kind of thoughts either.
Basically, you're lucky if you live in a situation that gives you the leisure and time to sit around and think about life being a farce. Probably he should be sitting around thinking, "boy, i'm so lucky I get to sit in this nice coffeeshop with no reason to work, no threat to my life, just chilling, so I can ponder on what a farce life is"
Edit: Because some people start criticising my comment, here's an addition:
How many people who were living in the 1700s do you think sat around thinking life is a farce?
Ponder on that question. Out of everyone living in the world today, how many people do you think sit around thinking life is a farce, who are those people? Why do you think they are thinking this?
I think it's an important question to ask and think about. It's saying something about our society, way of life, way of seeing the world.
In my opinion, life is for living, being with people, engaging in the world, taking action, connecting with people, and giving back. When you stop living, engaging with the world, and spend too much time alone, you start thinking this way.
I think if Bob Odenkirk lived on a community farm where everyone had to work together to survive he would be far happier and think life is far more meaningful.
It's shows true ignorance about what happiness is and where it's found. You can probably find more smiles and hope for the future in the Ukrainian trenches than reading comments from Silicon Valley workers making $150k a year.
I mean, do you guys even know Buddhism any more? It was such a hip thing in the 70s over there.
Well, I didn't expect I would have to spell it out.
But seriously think about it. Why doesn't your pet dog sit around thinking about what a farce life is?
How many people who were living in the 1700s do you think sat around thinking life is a farce?
Ponder on that question. Out of everyone living in the world today, how many people do you think sit around thinking life is a farce, who are those people? Why do you think they are thinking this?
I think it's an important question to ask and think about. It's saying something about our society, way of life, way of seeing the world.
Miners had elevated suicide rates and alcoholism rates. And when you read stories of families from such environments, similar thoughts were present. Yes, they did had these kind of thoughts. It is not just perfectly possible to be poor hard worker with family and have depression or missing meaning of life, but entirely common.
Miners may have had elevated suicide rates or alcoholism, but are you telling me they sat around thinking life is a meaningless farce?
Miners suffered from hideous diseases due to breathing in huge amounts of toxic chemicals, so yes, that resulted in elevated risk of suicide and alcoholism.
But were they really sitting around discussing absurdism, nihilism, life being a farce? This sort of thinking is really much more of a modern phenomenon, a privilege of the rich and educated with lots of free time.
> Miners may have had elevated suicide rates or alcoholism, but are you telling me they sat around thinking life is a meaningless farce?
Yes they were talking about it while drinking beer and cheap distillate. What makes you think they could not possibly talk about it?
> This sort of thinking is really much more of a modern phenomenon, a privilege of the rich and educated with lots of free time.
Dude, we have history of nihilistic writings going on far far into the history. Including complains of rich people about poor having those attitudes.
> Miners suffered from hideous diseases due to breathing in huge amounts of toxic chemicals, so yes, that resulted in elevated risk of suicide and alcoholism.
Sure, depending on place and time, the health impact could be extremely serious. But blaming all alcoholism, depressions and suicides on that only would be absurd.
> There’s no question that the security that you feel from not being afraid of a health issue or housing is a great comfort and helps you to be more at peace with life. It’s just not as much help as you think it should be.
Your last sentence claims that he should appreciate how lucky he is. But this is a different question from what, at face value, the statement that life is meaningless or absurd is about. The two choices (first being operative in this thread):
1. Life is meaningless: descriptive claim
2. You ought to appreciate life to the best of your ability: normative claim
> I think if Bob Odenkirk lived on a community farm where everyone had to work together to survive he would be far happier and think life is far more meaningful.
Probably a better question would be ask the Amish how happy they are? G-D was conceived to fill this gap in the human experience. The Amish harness it to set limits on desire.
From all the parochial nationalistic close minded savage bigoted homophobic toxic macho corrupt Putin boot licking behavior they regularly exhibit, and their spectacularly brutal self-destructive war criminal performance in Ukraine, you'd think they all lived on a community farm, raised as livestock and cannon fodder.
Living in modern cosmopolitan Moscow yet still acting and thinking that way is so much worse than actually being born on a community farm without choosing that lifestyle and mentality.
> How many people who were living in the 1700s do you think sat around thinking life is a farce?
The name for this view of the universe is "absurdism". It was first espoused, as far as I can tell, when the discourse of Qohelet was recorded in the book of Ecclesiastes. So yes, they had it in the 1700's although perhaps not by that name.
> If you're working every day in a coal mine so you can feed your children otherwise they will go hungry, then you don't have these kind of thoughts.
This is almost the opposite of the truth. Those with careers that do not occupy their minds do not sit around with their brains idling and empty all day. They spend much of that time thinking about exactly this sort of thing.
I suspect it to be far less rare than you think. Literally every human at some point in their life asks "What is the purpose of my existence?". They are then faced with some variation on "to be or not to be." It is not the exclusive domain of the idle and the educated, they're just the ones who write about it. It's a universal condition, and effects those without leisure equally. If that weren't true religion would not have been the driving force behind much of civilizations rise. Even the overworked and overwrought look for answers. Perhaps ESPECIALLY the overworked and overwrought. So maybe they did not sit about in cafe's discussing it, they mined coal while thinking it quietly to themselves or shouted it in crowded bars after work when they'd had a bit too much to drink.
Hell, I was a teenager working at Taco Bell when I first read Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus". Well before that though many a bean burrito were handed out the window while I considered the absurdity of life. Perhaps my thinking wasn't as nuanced as it would later come to be, but the concepts occurred to me quite naturally.
The fact that you're 1) Posting on Hackernews and 2) Read Camus as a teenager, already puts you in a group which is very atypical.
I would say, if you're reading Camus for fun and not a school assignment as a teenager, you're in the 0.01% of people or probably 0.001% of people in the world in terms of priviledge and education. And certainly, in the 1700s this group was much smaller as a percentage of the overall population as free-time was much more rare and books, education were much less common.
In 1750, the majority of France's population were peasants who lived in the fields, they weren't pondering the meaning of philosophical literature at weekends.
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing
Did you read the article? He struggled for many years before achieving fame, and his main source of purpose was having young children. The HN headline doesn’t give the context that he feels outside of Mr Show and raising children, and after a near death experience, he feels less purpose than ever.
Bob Odenkirk's publicist would like the gullible public to think that his client is some sort of deeply thoughtful intellectual because he's trying to line up his next gig and having his name in the public zeitgeist will land him a fatter paycheck.
For real. The headline ought to be "NYT would like to remind you that life is a meaningless farce":
Interviewer: There’s a holistic observation I want to make about our conversation. You talked about how the best times in your life were when your kids were little. Those times are over. You said the art form you love the most, sketch comedy, is a young man’s game. That’s over for you. Life? It’s a farce.
You can really tell from the comments those who didn't read the article and who are taking the headline extremely literally.
He quoted Shakespeare's MacBeth, "It is a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing." when talking about he thinks sketch comedy is the greatest form of self expression, even moreso than poetry from people like Shakespeare.
It was forced by the interviewer for a clickbait flair. The headline ought to be "NYT would like to remind you that life is a meaningless farce":
Interviewer: There’s a holistic observation I want to make about our conversation. You talked about how the best times in your life were when your kids were little. Those times are over. You said the art form you love the most, sketch comedy, is a young man’s game. That’s over for you. Life? It’s a farce.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/25/magazine/bob-odenkirk-int...
https://archive.is/zPqra
This was an interesting interview. Like a lot of great comedians, Odenkirk has a very grounded and bleak view of the world. I suppose a lot of art, comedy included, is a way of coping with their perspective, for themselves and for the audience.
I think it has more to do with Comedians having to work their way up the chain.
I think it's less about comedy being the outlet to "cope" with what you see, and more about seeing the comedy because you are able to see the world for what it really is.
Most of timeless comedy simply describes the mundane reality of the audience in a way that they realize the absurdity of it.
A lot of comedians, ie standup ones but not only, have had hard lives, suffer from depression, anxieties and so on. The better the ones the more (ie Robin Williams). Making people laugh is their coping, validation and approval mechanism for the world and life.
Such people have different perspectives on life, success and happiness, for better or worse.
> Like a lot of great comedians, Odenkirk has a very grounded and bleak view of the world. I suppose a lot of art, comedy included, is a way of coping with their perspective, for themselves and for the audience.
IIRC, I've heard it said that comedians are not happy people and usually had pretty difficult childhoods where "being funny" was a coping mechanism.
Some of the famous ones like Carlin seemed like they had some mental patterns that favored the line of work. Famously if he wasn’t performing he was thinking of new material virtually every waking minute. Pathological dedication to the craft.
I liked the shoutout to On Cinema at the Cinema. Truly one of the most hilarious and fascinating pieces of comedy in the last couple of decades.
It's my favorite comedy of all time. It's been going for over 10 years with a lot of little spin offs along the way. For those that want to take the plunge you can watch the first first ten seasons, Oscar specials, Decker, etc. for free on YouTube. Use this playlist to watch everything in chronological order.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qFHLfmoLchI&list=PLRT5PdjVF-ip...
Same. I have found it impossible to explain to the uninitiated so I delight in finding others who’ve found it!
Can't believe that Heidecker keeps getting away with murder.
Oh boy, another one of these jackoffs. Rosetti the Rat couldn't get him convicted because HE DID NOTHING WRONG. You people need to let it go.
We all know what happened. Toni the drunk was hammered for the whole trial and deliberation and had the hots for Heideckers rock aura and endless supply of chardonnay.
[stub for offtopicness]
[article authors don't write these headlines, you guys - let alone interview subjects]
When the zeitgeist is overwhelmingly nihilist, dare to be an absurdist.
I came here to say this.
Once you realize that life has no meaning, except that which we arbitrarily assign, you can only go a few ways with it. Of all the 'ism's you could choose in that moment, absudism is perhaps the least worst.
"Credo quia absurdum est."
What you're describing is "existentialism", and Camus's absurdidm is a reaction to it. The difference is subtle, but important to Camus.
It's been a very long time since I studied it, so you're likely right... but I thought that existentialism was the problem statement (life has no inherent meaning so we bring our own) and that absurdism and nihilism were both responses to it?
My understanding has always been that Absurdism says that while the search for meaning is absurd we should search anyhow if we feel like it (our happy friend Sisyphus). Whereas Nihilism's answer was more along the lines of Bukowski's "Don't Try." They both recognize that Sisyphus's job is pointless, but the absurdists suggest we keep pushing the boulder anyhow.
Am I missing something?
My own understanding is: all three of existentialism, nihilism and absurdism are responses to the same question (that of the meaning of life). All three agree on the fact that there is no inherent, "natural" meaning.
Nihilism gives you nothing more. Absurdism claims you must embrace this lack of meaning and thrive in spite of it. Existentialism claims you can create your own.
Camus thought Existentialism was "cheating" and trying to deny the correct conclusion that life is meaningless. Also, he diskliked Sartre a lot.
Auberon Quinn, is that you?
> But let me give you a very serious warning. Be careful how you ask me to do anything outré, to imitate the man in the pantomime, and to sit on my hat. Because I am a man whose soul has been emptied of all pleasures but folly. And for twopence I'd do it."
> "Do it, then," said Lambert, swinging his stick impatiently. "It would be funnier than the bosh you and Barker talk."
> Quin, standing on the top of the hill, stretched his hand out towards the main avenue of Kensington Gardens.
> "Two hundred yards away," he said, "are all your fashionable acquaintances with nothing on earth to do but to stare at each other and at us. We are standing upon an elevation under the open sky, a peak as it were of fantasy, a Sinai of humour. We are in a great pulpit or platform, lit up with sunlight, and half London can see us. Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20058/20058-h/20058-h.htm
Absurdism (of the Camus variety) is boomer nihilism.
> The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it's very brightly colored and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question: "Is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say: "Hey, don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride."
Bill Hicks
Fixed name
The title reminded me of this too, but it was Bill Hicks, not Richard Hicks.
Bill Hicks was spot on for most of the things.
So basically, Buddhism?
[deleted]
It's all donosaur piss anyway.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-10-06/recycled-wa...
Or Camus.
> The world is like a ride in an amusement park
only difference is, in real world there may be consequences that you may not be able to undo so you may have to be little careful while riding.
I've seen some pretty janky rides at state and county fairs.
Well, and some people are able to buy nicer seats on the ride with plush seats and air conditioning, and some people have to sit on hard backed plastic that hurts, and some people around you don’t get a seat at all and fall off and die routinely, and the ride keeps moving.
Yea. "Life is an amusement park ride" is a pretty privileged take. If life is like an amusement park ride, there are about 500-1000 people in the world actually riding it, and the remaining 8 billion or so of us are operators, maintenance staff, concession stand workers, and groundskeepers keeping it fun for those 500-1000 riders.
Do you really need to be a billionaire to feel like life is like an amusement park?
I believe the sentiment is that it’s a ride because it consists of synthetic stimulus, not because it is enjoyable.
Return to Monkey Island.
When you're successful and rich (enough, at least), this is a nice whimsical thing to say. When you're suffering in the trenches, this isn't very helpful.
Yeah - but it may be a good way to articulate a bleak, from-the-trenches perspective on the world.
Your comment is exactly what successful and rich people say. You can find a lot of joy and acceptance among the poorest of people: the mind is remarkably adaptable, yet it's only those that always strive for more that cannot enjoy life's little moments.
I truly dislike this recent trend of making people feel bad if they have learned to just slow down and be content with life. "It's privilege being able to take a break and smell the roses, I'm too busy for this nonsense" is protestant crab mentality that I find revolting.
I think you misinterpreted. The comment said "When you're suffering...", not "When you're poor..."
"Desire is the root of all suffering" — Buddha
You'll have a hard time finding more suffering than in Wall Street. Meanwhile I haven't found more content, relaxed people than when I visited my distant family in sub-Saharan Africa, taking life as it comes. My point still stands.
> Meanwhile I haven't found more content, relaxed people than when I visited my distant family in sub-Saharan Africa, taking life as it comes. My point still stands.
You seem to be arguing against the point "only happy people can be rich". This isn't what the GP comment said. It said only rich people come out with things like "life is a farce". Which I think is true. Are any of your sub saharan african relatives giving interviews to press pontificating on such things? I assume no.
> Are any of your sub saharan african relatives giving interviews to press pontificating on such things? I assume no.
No, but the first thing they say to a Westerner like me is "what are you fretting about? You white people are always stressed and busy. Just take a breath. The world isn't going anywhere."
It takes a lot of energy and effort to be rich and to chase money; these are not the people that say "life is a farce".
Your comment is borne from the idea that money does create happiness, so only rich people can enjoy life and have a laugh about it. This is not a universal maxim, just a cultural artefact of the protestant ethos that finds in maximum expression in the American capitalist society. In the rest of the world, it's the complete opposite.
You know what, no you wont have hard time finding more suffering then in Wall Street. I am not saying they are all happy, but the hell non-Wall Street people suffer as often and a lot.
Only rich people are unhappy and suffering is such a ridiculous point, frankly.
Including in Africa for that matter. In fact, you will find plenty of people there that go to extremes to avoid or minimize suffering ... including making other sub-africans super suffering in the process. That happy take life as it comes sub-Saharan Africa includes Sudan and Congo full of people who are not happy and very active in trying to change thing around them (not necessarily in the positive sense).
Exactly! What a high-profile actor’s life represents to an accountant or a programmer, that accountant’s or programmer’s life similarly represents to a factory worker, and so on.
I've met "too busy for this" people in every line of work, regardless of their pay band. When you get to know people, you will see that pretty much everyone has their own trenches, and slowing down is a matter of priorities, not privilege.
if you are too busy to think consequently everything you are doing is without knowing any justification or explanation
"too busy" is arguing for ignorance, which is defensible but not agreed on
> You can find a lot of joy and acceptance among the poorest of people: the mind is remarkably adaptable, yet it's only those that always strive for more that cannot enjoy life's little moments.
See perhaps Viktor Frankl on this:
> Man's Search for Meaning (German: ... trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen. Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager, lit. '... Say Yes to Life nonetheless: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp') is a 1946 book by Viktor Frankl chronicling his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, and describing his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying a purpose to each person's life through one of three ways: the completion of tasks, caring for another person, or finding meaning by facing suffering with dignity.
> Frankl observed that among the fellow inmates in the concentration camp, those who survived were able to connect with a purpose in life to feel positive about and who then immersed themselves in imagining that purpose in their own way, such as conversing with an (imagined) loved one. According to Frankl, the way a prisoner imagined the future affected their longevity.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27s_Search_for_Meaning
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl
I'm not sure what you are trying to express here. Is it "rich people shouldn't express their worldview" or "the idea that life is inherently meaningless is incorrect"? A younger me ingested this sentiment as a call to action to create the meaning I wanted in the world.
>Is it "rich people shouldn't express their worldview"
If that was the case, how better off we'd be.
How would we be better off?
The greediest bastards with undue influece wouldn't have a say.
They’d still act, just not explain…
Still an improvement, any explanation is a lie anyway!
Much worse.
I'm not against rich people outright, but I am against the ones who try to pay people as little as possible sharing their views. And especially the views that contradict (working hard) how they got their wealth (not working hard) in the first place.
On the contrary, read the piece. He's not saying it from comfort, he's saying it after a heart attack, after his kids grew up, after the form he loved became a young man's game. The farce isn't a punchline delivered from above; it's what's left when the registers that used to hold you don't anymore. And his answer isn't despair, it's "we've got to keep trying… there's a breeze beneath my wings." That's not whimsy. That's the thing the trenches actually teach you, if you survive them.
A triple "It's not this... it's that"...
like a lot of tweets in my timeline these days
I can’t be the only one who finds it rude to use AI to contribute to a discussion. I find invasive I had to read what I thought was human.
Using it for translation would be different though.
So very rude. If you prefix it with "the LLM says", I'm fine with it. But taking that hot air and pretending it's yours? It's not just rude, it's dishonest.
It’s not just X, it’s Y. It’s not rude, it’s hackneyed use of language.
You’re absolutely right! It’s not just X, it’s Y. /s.
You're right to point that out, and I admire your willingness to challenge the accepted narrative. That writing style not just unique to AI — all humans write like that. That's not annoying — it's refreshing. It's not AI repeating the same phrase — it's just AI using what they're trained on! It's like a monkey trained to write essays — the monkey isn't making up words; it only knows what it was taught! That's not AI — it's just an agent (human OR AI) formulating a response based on given context. That's not exhausting — it's informative!
Breaking chacter for a minute, it really annoys me every time a blatantly obvious LLM comment is called out, it's flooded with replies like "No, I akshually write like that - people have always written exactly like that" as if its not obvious lol
to be fair, em-dashes were cool which is why AI uses it so heavily which is why they are uncool now. round and round we go... and I loved the in-character response.
LLMs write like that because people write like that. That they used the rhetorical device three times in a row in a single paragraph makes me think it’s less likely to be LLM and just how that person writes.
The robots use it a lot because it's a common construct in their training data, because it's a common construct in text written by humans
Obviously any comment that doesn't match the responders exact style must be AI /s.
i’ve caught myself doing the “it’s this and that — it’s not the other” thing a few times. i dunno if it’s because i’ve seen it so many times because of AI generated comments etc and that’s become a norm in my brain, or if it was actually something i do regularly and ive just never noticed it.
it might be the latter, because i always got the title of this paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.02175 backwards. i used to write it adversarial examples are features, not bugs (which is apparently not correct in english language 0_o)
regardless, ive started editing it out when i notice ive done it now.
it’s a common construct in human text *selected for the most engaging constructs by AI companies optimizing their usage metrics
Yeah, sadly thought the same. I even agree with the clanker's sentiment.
Triples is best.
> On the contrary, read the piece. He's not saying it from comfort, he's saying it after a heart attack, after his kids grew up, after the form he loved became a young man's game. The farce isn't a punchline delivered from above; it's what's left when the registers that used to hold you don't anymore.
Sounds like a typical mid-life (identity) crisis?
Contrast this with the life perspective of Stephen Colbert, who lost his father and two brother to a plane crash when he was 10:
> “It was a very healthy reciprocal acceptance of suffering,” he said. “Which does not mean being defeated by suffering. Acceptance is not defeat. Acceptance is just awareness.” He smiled in anticipation of the callback: “ ‘You gotta learn to love the bomb,’ ” he said. “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that's why. Maybe, I don't know. That might be why you don't see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It's that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”
> I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien's mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn't mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”
> He was 35, he said, before he could really feel the truth of that. He was walking down the street, and it “stopped me dead. I went, ‘Oh, I'm grateful. Oh, I feel terrible.’ I felt so guilty to be grateful. But I knew it was true.
* https://archive.is/https://www.gq.com/story/stephen-colbert-...
His interview with Anderson Cooper, where they go over this (amongst other things), is worth checking out (see ~12m43s):
> Then you have to be grateful for all of it. You can't pick and choose what you're grateful for. So what do you get from loss? You get awareness of other people's loss, which allows you to connect with that other person. Which allows you to love more deeply and understand what it means to be a human being, if it's true that all humans suffer. […] It's about the fullness of your humanity: what's the point of being here and being human if you can't be the most human you can be? I'm not saying 'best', because you can be a bad person but a most human. […]
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB46h1koicQ
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
-- Kahil Gibran
I find it rather hopeless that people can "survive the trenches" and tell others" that life is meaningless.
The perspective that affords that life is cruel to some and kind to others, and it's just random and meaningless really doesn't sit well with the people who have to struggle to survive without the chance for joy in life.
If I am just going to suffer endlessly while others enjoy a life of luxury, why not burn the whole thing down? There is a disturbing goal for some people who want equality, and that is universal suffering and misery...
Who are you even talking about? Bob didn't say life is meaningless. If you want the perspective of someone who survived the "trenches" and kept a meaningful perspective on life then I recommend the book "Man's search for meaning" by Viktor Frankl.
Strictly speaking, meaninglessness is opposed to farce. You can’t have both utter meaninglessness and farce, because meaning is intrinsic to farce.
Comedy presupposes meaning, because comedy hinges on the absurd, but the absurd is a departure from meaning or a deviation from it. Something is absurd when it fails to be meaningful and fails to satisfy the rational in the broader context of rational meaning.
There is no laughter in the utterly meaningless. There cannot be silliness without an overarching context of seriousness.
I doubt Bill Hicks was that rich. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgzQuE1pR1w
Or Bukowski. Or Lenny Bruce. Or any other number of people "in the trenches".
That's backwards: it is helpful to keep that in mind precisely when you're suffering in the trenches.
Rich and succesful people try to forget that, which is their hubris.
Having been in both, literally and metaphorically, it’s a useful mantra both places
You can also use “this too shall pass” if you want a lighter version
Did you read the interview? He basically says as much.
>There’s no question that the security that you feel from not being afraid of a health issue or housing is a great comfort and helps you to be more at peace with life. It’s just not as much help as you think it should be.
I’ll disagree with Odenkirk there. Not having to try to decide if you think one of your kids should be taken to the ER at the expense of the other kid for what is probably not an emergency infection, but maybe there’s a chance it could spread and cause real damage so antibiotics now would help, but then the other kid won’t be able to do xyz due to not having a spare $2,000 is a pretty shitty experience.
Security of housing and healthcare is an enormous boost in life. I avoided playing sports when I was a kid because my dad told me a broken arm would set the family back (there were no out of pocket maximums back then).
The government paid if you were dirt poor and had no prospects, or employer or government paid if you were a white collar/union or government employee, but for immigrants invested into their 24/7 small business, they had assets that could be seized but very little cash flow to be able to pay unexpected bills.
I agree. I'm quite sure even Bob would agree. He never even used the words "farce" or "meaning(less)". He just agreed to "life is a farce" in a context that mostly reflected on his work as a comedian. Also the entire interview reads quite performative. This whole emotions-are-just-molecules, life-is-just-a-game etc perspectives fall flat as soon as the doctor tells the armchair-nihilist he has cancer ... suddenly life feels like something more important than a game and the feelings are no longer just molecules.
The thing is, if you never question anything, just lifing is worth it in itself.
If you do think too much about everything, and you survive this, you will land somewhere and this somewhere will be content.
I'm thinking about happiness and what I want for so long, that I now have crossed my half life point.
You also need to have a certain amount of freedom to even have this problem which makes it weird for others not having this. Oh you are not happy? But you have money?! I would be happy with money, i'm struggling.
Its weird if you sometimes think it would be interesting to struggle.
American or British farce?
This is the kind of thought that only rich and successful people can have.
If you're working every day in a coal mine so you can feed your children otherwise they will go hungry, then you don't have these kind of thoughts.
Similarly, if you're fighting in a war so your family isn't raped or murdered then you don't have these kind of thoughts either.
Basically, you're lucky if you live in a situation that gives you the leisure and time to sit around and think about life being a farce. Probably he should be sitting around thinking, "boy, i'm so lucky I get to sit in this nice coffeeshop with no reason to work, no threat to my life, just chilling, so I can ponder on what a farce life is"
Edit: Because some people start criticising my comment, here's an addition:
How many people who were living in the 1700s do you think sat around thinking life is a farce?
Ponder on that question. Out of everyone living in the world today, how many people do you think sit around thinking life is a farce, who are those people? Why do you think they are thinking this?
I think it's an important question to ask and think about. It's saying something about our society, way of life, way of seeing the world.
In my opinion, life is for living, being with people, engaging in the world, taking action, connecting with people, and giving back. When you stop living, engaging with the world, and spend too much time alone, you start thinking this way.
I think if Bob Odenkirk lived on a community farm where everyone had to work together to survive he would be far happier and think life is far more meaningful.
Already ranted about comments like yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47919820
It's shows true ignorance about what happiness is and where it's found. You can probably find more smiles and hope for the future in the Ukrainian trenches than reading comments from Silicon Valley workers making $150k a year.
I mean, do you guys even know Buddhism any more? It was such a hip thing in the 70s over there.
So you're saying that life isn't a farce? Or that it is, and poor people don't ponder it? Just expressing disapproval of rich people?
the only thesis/proposition i see in the comment would be:
"poor people don't think about it"
no other claims
Well, I didn't expect I would have to spell it out.
But seriously think about it. Why doesn't your pet dog sit around thinking about what a farce life is?
How many people who were living in the 1700s do you think sat around thinking life is a farce?
Ponder on that question. Out of everyone living in the world today, how many people do you think sit around thinking life is a farce, who are those people? Why do you think they are thinking this?
I think it's an important question to ask and think about. It's saying something about our society, way of life, way of seeing the world.
So poor people and historical people are in the same bucket as dogs, got it.
How lucky we are to be the only generation in history capable of thinking and reflecting!
Miners had elevated suicide rates and alcoholism rates. And when you read stories of families from such environments, similar thoughts were present. Yes, they did had these kind of thoughts. It is not just perfectly possible to be poor hard worker with family and have depression or missing meaning of life, but entirely common.
Miners may have had elevated suicide rates or alcoholism, but are you telling me they sat around thinking life is a meaningless farce?
Miners suffered from hideous diseases due to breathing in huge amounts of toxic chemicals, so yes, that resulted in elevated risk of suicide and alcoholism.
But were they really sitting around discussing absurdism, nihilism, life being a farce? This sort of thinking is really much more of a modern phenomenon, a privilege of the rich and educated with lots of free time.
> Miners may have had elevated suicide rates or alcoholism, but are you telling me they sat around thinking life is a meaningless farce?
Yes they were talking about it while drinking beer and cheap distillate. What makes you think they could not possibly talk about it?
> This sort of thinking is really much more of a modern phenomenon, a privilege of the rich and educated with lots of free time.
Dude, we have history of nihilistic writings going on far far into the history. Including complains of rich people about poor having those attitudes.
> Miners suffered from hideous diseases due to breathing in huge amounts of toxic chemicals, so yes, that resulted in elevated risk of suicide and alcoholism.
Sure, depending on place and time, the health impact could be extremely serious. But blaming all alcoholism, depressions and suicides on that only would be absurd.
I believe he addresses this point:
> There’s no question that the security that you feel from not being afraid of a health issue or housing is a great comfort and helps you to be more at peace with life. It’s just not as much help as you think it should be.
Your last sentence claims that he should appreciate how lucky he is. But this is a different question from what, at face value, the statement that life is meaningless or absurd is about. The two choices (first being operative in this thread):
1. Life is meaningless: descriptive claim
2. You ought to appreciate life to the best of your ability: normative claim
Your argument has no bearing on the first claim.
> I think if Bob Odenkirk lived on a community farm where everyone had to work together to survive he would be far happier and think life is far more meaningful.
So you think everyone was happier in the USSR? /s
So you think everyone in the USSR lived on a community farm?
I guess you don't really understand the USSR then...
Probably a better question would be ask the Amish how happy they are? G-D was conceived to fill this gap in the human experience. The Amish harness it to set limits on desire.
From all the parochial nationalistic close minded savage bigoted homophobic toxic macho corrupt Putin boot licking behavior they regularly exhibit, and their spectacularly brutal self-destructive war criminal performance in Ukraine, you'd think they all lived on a community farm, raised as livestock and cannon fodder.
Living in modern cosmopolitan Moscow yet still acting and thinking that way is so much worse than actually being born on a community farm without choosing that lifestyle and mentality.
> How many people who were living in the 1700s do you think sat around thinking life is a farce?
The name for this view of the universe is "absurdism". It was first espoused, as far as I can tell, when the discourse of Qohelet was recorded in the book of Ecclesiastes. So yes, they had it in the 1700's although perhaps not by that name.
> If you're working every day in a coal mine so you can feed your children otherwise they will go hungry, then you don't have these kind of thoughts.
This is almost the opposite of the truth. Those with careers that do not occupy their minds do not sit around with their brains idling and empty all day. They spend much of that time thinking about exactly this sort of thing.
Note, I didn't say "no people" thought this way. Just that very, very few people thought this way, which is absolutely accurate.
Unless you thought most people in the 1700s were sat around smoking cigarettes in cafes discussing the absurdism of life?
I suspect it to be far less rare than you think. Literally every human at some point in their life asks "What is the purpose of my existence?". They are then faced with some variation on "to be or not to be." It is not the exclusive domain of the idle and the educated, they're just the ones who write about it. It's a universal condition, and effects those without leisure equally. If that weren't true religion would not have been the driving force behind much of civilizations rise. Even the overworked and overwrought look for answers. Perhaps ESPECIALLY the overworked and overwrought. So maybe they did not sit about in cafe's discussing it, they mined coal while thinking it quietly to themselves or shouted it in crowded bars after work when they'd had a bit too much to drink.
Hell, I was a teenager working at Taco Bell when I first read Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus". Well before that though many a bean burrito were handed out the window while I considered the absurdity of life. Perhaps my thinking wasn't as nuanced as it would later come to be, but the concepts occurred to me quite naturally.
The fact that you're 1) Posting on Hackernews and 2) Read Camus as a teenager, already puts you in a group which is very atypical.
I would say, if you're reading Camus for fun and not a school assignment as a teenager, you're in the 0.01% of people or probably 0.001% of people in the world in terms of priviledge and education. And certainly, in the 1700s this group was much smaller as a percentage of the overall population as free-time was much more rare and books, education were much less common.
In 1750, the majority of France's population were peasants who lived in the fields, they weren't pondering the meaning of philosophical literature at weekends.
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing
-William Shakespeare
Did you read the article? He struggled for many years before achieving fame, and his main source of purpose was having young children. The HN headline doesn’t give the context that he feels outside of Mr Show and raising children, and after a near death experience, he feels less purpose than ever.
Bob Odenkirk's publicist would like the gullible public to think that his client is some sort of deeply thoughtful intellectual because he's trying to line up his next gig and having his name in the public zeitgeist will land him a fatter paycheck.
Easy to be philosopher when you are millionaire.
he didn't get to millionaire without doing comedy for a while, lot of digging into the human condition there.
easy to be a philosopher when you're forced to portray pathos and bathos, on camera, for years
Genesis 25:32
Esau replied, "Behold, I am going to die; so why do I need this birthright?"
“It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”
Booo, nihilism is dumb.
This is a very new york times headline.
For real. The headline ought to be "NYT would like to remind you that life is a meaningless farce":
Interviewer: There’s a holistic observation I want to make about our conversation. You talked about how the best times in your life were when your kids were little. Those times are over. You said the art form you love the most, sketch comedy, is a young man’s game. That’s over for you. Life? It’s a farce.
Odenkirk: Yeah.
life sucks and then we die
You can really tell from the comments those who didn't read the article and who are taking the headline extremely literally.
He quoted Shakespeare's MacBeth, "It is a tale, Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing." when talking about he thinks sketch comedy is the greatest form of self expression, even moreso than poetry from people like Shakespeare.
It's not that deep.
It was forced by the interviewer for a clickbait flair. The headline ought to be "NYT would like to remind you that life is a meaningless farce":
Interviewer: There’s a holistic observation I want to make about our conversation. You talked about how the best times in your life were when your kids were little. Those times are over. You said the art form you love the most, sketch comedy, is a young man’s game. That’s over for you. Life? It’s a farce.
Odenkirk: Yeah.