Escalation and absurdity

Escalation and absurdity is the technique of beginning a scenario plausibly and escalating it through a series of internally coherent steps until it reaches a visual non-sequitur or logical extreme. The willingness to follow a satirical logic all the way to its visual limit is the joke.

It works because the internal coherence makes the escalation feel both inevitable and absurd. Each step follows from the last, so the audience is carried to the extreme rather than dropped there. The actual satirical target is the tendency of social dynamics to follow a self-reinforcing logic until they become ridiculous — a debate about a dog’s haircut escalating to an argument about the shape of the planet.

The representative years are 2009, where the Global Financial Crisis escalates until everyone in Australia has had their face replaced with Kekovich’s, and 2021, where state-border closures extend into concrete walls stretching to infinity, visible from space. The 2025 comment-section escalation belongs here too. The device produces the campaign’s visual non-sequiturs — the 2022 lamb-cutlet smoke signal, the 2024 chasm in the earth — and pairs with literalised metaphor, where an abstract social concept is treated as physical reality and a whole world is built from it. It is the natural extension of the campaign’s hyperbole.

What makes it recognisably this campaign is the creative confidence to commit to the visual logic of a premise no matter how far it goes.

The sources flag two risks. First, escalation that breaks its own internal rules becomes confusing rather than absurd — the coherence is what makes it work. Second, escalation that relies on contemporary reference points can lose its comedy when the reference fades. As one of the campaign’s most reliable tools, it works best when it culminates in the warm ensemble resolution that releases the accumulated energy.