Music’s comic absurdity stems from uselessness carried on with worklike strain

Evidence

Music has become comic in the present phase primarily because something so completely useless is carried on with all the visible signs of the strain of serious work. By being alien to solid people, music reveals their alienation from one another, and the consciousness of alienation vents itself in laughter. In music - or similarly in lyric poetry - the society which judged them comic becomes comic. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 107

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Pairs with how earnestness is read as comedy in the age of productivity — a mechanism testable on modern ‘high seriousness’ culture.