syn. funny, amusing, laughable, droll
From Jaon Didion’s "Marrying Absurd":
But what strikes one most about the Strip chapels, with their wishing wells and stained-glass paper windows and their artificial bouvardia, is that so much of their business is by no means a matter of simple convenience, of late-night liaisons between show girls and baby Crosbys. Of course there is some of that. (One night about eleven o’clock in Las Vegas I watched a bride in an orange minidress and masses of flame-colored hair stumble from a Strip chapel on the arm of her bridegroom, who looked the part of the expendable nephew in movies like Miami Syndicate. “I gotta get the kids,” the bride whimpered. “I gotta pick up the sitter, I gotta get to the midnight show.” “What you gotta get,” the Bridegroom said, opening the door of a Cadillac Coupe de Ville and watching her crumple on the seat, “is sober.”) But Las Vegas seems to offer something other than “convenience”; it is merchandising “niceness,” the facsimile of proper ritual, to children who do not know how else to find it, how to make the arrangements, how to do it “right.” All day and evening long on the Strip, one sees actual wedding parties, waiting under the harsh lights at a crosswalk, standing uneasily in the parking lot of the Frontier while a photographer hired by The Little Church of the West (“Wedding Place of the Stars”) certifies the occasion, takes the picture: the bride in a veil and white satin pumps, the bridegroom usually in a white dinner jacket, and even an attendant or two, a sister or best friend in hot-pink peau de soie, a flirtation veil, a carnation nosegay. “When I fall in Love It Will Be Forever,” the organist plays, and then a few bars of Lohengrin. The mother cries; the stepfather, awkward in his role, invites the chapel hostess to join them for a drink at the Sands. The hostess declines with a professional smile; she has already transferred her interest to a group of people waiting outside. One bride out, another in, and again the sign goes up on the chapel door. “One moment please—Wedding.”
In her essay "Marrying Absurd", Joan Didion comically criticizes the commercialization of marriage in Las Vegas. Her recurrent use of superfluous details enclosed in parenthesis adds an undercurrent of jocularity to the entire piece. They also demonstrate the absurdity of Las Vegas weddings, characteristically filled with ribald drunkenness, excessive commercialization, and frequent divorces. Didion pokes fun at the cheap façade by pointing out that although wedding parties occur “all day and evening” in the Strip, they take place in “the parking lot of the Frontier” while all the newlyweds have to commemorate the occasion is a picture of themselves in rented clothes and possibly a close friend wearing a “hot-pink peau de soie.” Didion ends by exemplifying the fast-paced, meaningless Las Vegas wedding with a simple sign that says it all: “One moment please—Wedding.”
Didion, Joan. "Marrying Absurd." The Bedford Reader. Ed. X.. J.
Kennedy, Dorothy M. Kennedy, and Jane E. Aaron. 9th ed. Boston:
Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003. 159-161.