“A tomato is also a child’s balloon”

This chapter explores the structure and strategy of Surrealist humour as a moral attitude towards life. Morality, prima facie, is anathema to Surrealism because André Breton grounds Surrealism on psychic automatism, a “disinterested” play of thought “exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” Surrealism, however, is arguably the only modernist art movement that incubates a major moral sentiment—one that seeks to revolutionise life by unchaining the mind from all bourgeois ideological values. Humour is a, if not the, most effective approach the Surrealists, such as Breton, Péret, Brauner, Dalí, and Man Ray, adopt to realise psychic freedom. In humourising their verbal and visual images, the Surrealists, I suggest, engage fundamentally with pseudometaphor, a radical form of nonsense that is primarily born of accidental partial similitude and in tune with with early childhood cognition that triggers an orgy of identification. Surrealist pseudometaphor—both verbal and visual—wipes out sense through nonsense and liberating laughter, thereby subjucating rationality to absurdity, hiearchy to anarchy, adulthood to childhood.