Formalizing Absurdist and Satirical Narrative Devices

Nguyen and Ho (2026) argue that absurdist and satirical narrative devices can support paradoxical thinking in socio-psychological research, but do not specify, at the level of a single narrative unit, when a device counts as ironic, satirical, or merely incongruous, nor how such devices compound across a longer work. This method article works toward that specification. Using elementary probability, two lightweight decision-theoretic setups (credence goods and principal-agent problems), and an entropy-based measure of claim legitimacy, we define propositions that classify a narrative unit's comic or satirical status from two observable quantities, an asserted state and a realized state, and extend the framework to sequences of units using a previous-unit anchoring mechanism adapted from a companion treatment of institutional drift. Each proposition is proved from the stated definitions or, where it instead encodes a coding criterion adopted from an external theory, explicitly marked as such, and accompanied by an account of the cognitive or economic mechanism it draws on. We validate the framework against a published satirical fable collection, Wild Wise Weird: The Kingfisher Story Collection (Vuong, 2026), noting where the corpus supports the frame-work's constructions and where it does not, and discuss its applicability beyond fable.