One may approach Simpson's style through a subtitle of his own: farce in a new dimension…. Farce as a descriptive term is associated with stereotyped flat characters, intricate improbable situations and a well developed sense of the ridiculous. Laughter is its most essential ingredient.

The dividing line between comedy and farce has never been clear. In N. F. Simpson the plot is the stage action, the characters are certainly one-dimensional, and the milieu is a fantasy world with parallels to our own. The fantasy is based on reality. To locate Simpson's particular brand of farce one must precisely describe the nature of that relationship. Simpson insists that his characters are ordinary people in an extraordinary situation…. Moreover, he believes the comic effect derives from this incongruity…. (p. 300)

The fact that he is self-consciously clever does not make it any easier to come to terms with Simpson's sense of humor…. His humor derives from the fact that his characters are systematically deranged, that is to say, deranged according to a particular system: they apply inscrutable logic to fantastic situations and in both behavior and language they are trapped in patterns. In One Way Pendulum the characters act according to the Bergsonian principle of comedy—like machines they get caught in the momentum of the action and are identified by their characteristic activity. At one point Bro volunteers to be an electronic computer "for the laughs"…. A Resounding Tinkle is mostly linguistic acrobatics of a sort that involves the patterns of verbal logic. Simpson does have his favourites. Paradoxes, like the play titles, puns and the literal handling of metaphor abound—as when Mr. Groomkirby gets caught in his "loose end" or Middie goes to the window to see if the name fits. Sometimes his humor involves simple substitute of the logical expectation such as when Uncle Fred has changed not his appearance but his sex, and when one has a "read" instead of crumpets at tea, or when we hear hats praised as an important blessing. Beside the misapplication of verbal logic, much is sheer ridiculousness…. Simpson, as J. R. Taylor puts it, employs the gag as his "basic dramatic unit" [see excerpt above]. In this, and in his playing with the logical loopholes of language, Simpson has much in common with the nonsense of Lewis Carroll and of BBC Radio's Goon Show—a lunatic series of half-hour programs enormously popular in the 1950s. In fact, Simpson's creatures would be perfectly at home in Carroll's wonderland world—they all speak the same language. The nonsense of the looking-glass world which mirrors but inverts our own, (nonsense itself being a kind of sanity—insanity inversion), brings me back to the idea of Simpson's characters being systematically deranged. Simpson's pervading technique when presenting a situation is to displace the content but keep the form. Because they adhere to the form with manic determination the characters appear completely balmy. His characters are unaware of the substitution trick and we, Simpson seems to be saying, are equally unaware that the same is true in our own lives. Thus one might reasonably speak of a Christmas tree or a piece of furniture the way Bro and Middie discuss the elephant. It is normal to want to look like a fashion model, it is not normal to want to look like an ape and to stare at cages the way women gawk at Vogue. It is reasonable to like wearing black. It is not reasonable to insist on a logical pretext. In a like fashion our lives contain a good many forms from which the content has evaporated—the public rituals and ceremonies, the compulsions of petty social routines and so on. In that we are ridiculous. "Reasonable" and "normal" patterns of thought and action, Simpson points out, are simply those quite arbitrary conventions which are generally accepted; to demonstrate this he will take a speech or behavior pattern, scramble the "content" and leave the formal structure intact.

For Simpson's puppet creatures the form persists quite separate from the content which would render it meaningful. Frequently the structure has a momentum of its own which entraps them, as when Bro simply suggests Hodge for a name and that triggers the comic naming routine. Thus Simpson's point is that all language and behavior contains the seeds of the ludicrous. Whether or not this is a worthwhile point; whether or not Simpson's laughter is "thoughtful laughter" is a separate matter. Those who argue in the affirmative declare this aspect, this seriousness beneath the hilarity, the "new dimension." (pp. 300-02)

It seems to me that Simpson's satire, although present, is incidental. In contrast to former "corrective" comedy we are not laughing at misfits while celebrating the social ideal. Nor are we sharing the manic world of Ionesco's comedies, or the repressed and menaced one of Pinter's. Here the entire stage, a world of its own, is laughable. Opposed to its being serious sustained satire is first of all the tone, which is more whimsical than sarcastic. The playwright aims to amuse, to delight, not to confront. As you laugh your way out of the theater you might recall some serious innuendo, or you might not. There may be a message beneath the pile of jokes, or there may not. Simpson's plays are not the subtly provocative application of critical intelligence. The laughter he generates is not self-conscious and it is not hysterical. Secondly, moral distinctions and moral issues are not involved. He is not satirizing a vacuous reality to promote a positive alternative. Simpson is indulging his own lunatic vision in which everything seen from his perspective, is sublimely inane. But what is one supposed to do with a theory that adds up to: people are silly?

Nor can Simpson legitimately be considered an Absurdist. He employs many of their techniques but little of their philosophy. The attack on mechanical lives and complacent routines, the concentration on language sterility and linguistic games, and the theatricalism which reminds the audience that everything is fake are absurdist traits Simpson is familiar with. One might say that Simpson is doing consciously what he presents his characters doing unconsciously—speaking and behaving like Jarry's Pata-physicians in persistent travesty of the accepted structures of explanation and value. By this I mean the absurdist technique of deliberately debunking established standards and organizing principles. Thus his characters are unaware of causal relationships: they invent justifications and pretexts, they assign "causes" to "effects," but their explanations could apply equally well to any event. (pp. 302-03)

But the borrowing of techniques is as close as Simpson comes to the Absurdist position. Simpson does not attack social conventions themselves but rather the inanities that occur within the conventional framework. This is true whether the referrent is religion, government, law or domestic routines. He is not questioning the existence of the values, he is demonstrating their limits. Nor does Simpson question the existence of meaning behind the definition of words. It is not that human comprehension is confronted by nothingness, le néant, but that the way things are is incomprehensible. The world, on every level, is nonsensical—but that does not mean the same as saying it is therefore Absurd. Absurdism implies the concomitant philosophy of the insanity of the human condition, in a world devoid of significance apart from the pathetic attempts man makes to render himself meaningful. It states that this vacuum is reality and that this reality must be recognized in all its senselessness. The recognition of such fact should prove therapeutic…. Simpson gives us the laughter, he exposes the ridiculousness but does he give us a sense that this is a reality which must be confronted and transcended? Does he really have, in [Martin] Esslin's phrase, a "serious philosophical intent" [see excerpt above]? Simpson's plays do not embody existential concepts: there is no consciousness of their plight on the part of the characters, no sense of isolation or futility nor the repressed hysteria on the verge of exploding. There isn't even a suggestion of negativism beneath the jollity. In Camus' phrase, "the irrational and wild longing for clarity" which is inevitably frustrated, the anguish of the human predicament, seems to have passed Simpson by. He has no myth-makers, no heroic victims, none of the absurdist anti-heroes and no recognition that the inanity matters in any significant way.

I would argue that Simpson is definitely not an Absurdist in the metaphysical sense and that he ridicules life for relatively superficial reasons…. Simpson is interested in absurdity with a small "a." Essentially though, he is as close to The Goon Show and nonsense tradition as he is to the avant-garde. Like The Goon Show his plays are mostly a bundle of routines which can be easily relocated or omitted because there is little organizing plot or unifying philosophy…. If it is "farce in a new dimension," it is only in that his is a totally lunatic vision wherein everything is equally ridiculous and equally reducible to howling laughter. If the resultant attitude is that human society is ludicrous, what has been concluded by a statement like that? That we should be on guard against our own pomposity? That we should laugh at our sober-faced friends to alert them to their own, and our, ridiculousness? But perhaps we are being comic ourselves in insisting that an entertainer align himself with more significant thought…. Within his own singular and limited dimension he is very funny. But the critics overblew his case and so, naturally, he disappointed them. (pp. 303-05)