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If absurdity made us despondent or desperately sad instead, that probably wouldn't do much for the ol' evolutionary fitness.

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By default you don't have to have any such emotional reaction to absurdity. You could just analyze the situation and take action accordingly.

The point is exactly that you _can't_ just analyze every single situation that ever happens and then know what to do. That there's a huge amount of life experience for which there is no analytical solution. So you can't "just analyze" every single thing. What do you do then? Dispair? Or laugh.

The ancients eventually came up with the whole God thing to explain all confusion away but i have a feeling that happened after the evolutionary push to not kill yourself the first time you see lightening

So laugh = communication tool to indicate to others that a weird thing happened, but we think it's harmless, so we don't have to react?

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