The acclaimed animated series Adventure Time came to its conclusion this month with the finale of its tenth season. Created by Pendleton Ward (and developed by a long line of artists, writers, producers, and directors) it’s been widely acclaimed, called “the trippiest show on television”¹ and “the most inventive cartoon since The Simpsons.”² In 11-minute sequences brothers Finn and Jake protect their friends and the land of Ooo from the likes of zombies, witches, and overzealous businessmen. But under the surface of its psychedelic aesthetic, whimsical humor, and tales of fantastical heroism is an existential exploration of the meaning of striving in a world fated for destruction. Over the arc of these nearly three-hundred episodes, the series develops an outlook that shares many similarities with Camus’ absurdist philosophy expressed in his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus.³
In this way Adventure Time manages to blend the philosophical notions of the absurd, the struggle between the “human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any,”⁴ and the comically absurd, “extremely silly or ridiculous.”⁵ When first introduced to the land of Ooo, it’s a fanciful world where adoptive brothers and best-friends ‘Finn the human’ and ‘Jake the dog’ embark on a litany of farcical adventures both big and small, such as one in which they protect the…
