Absolutely. Camus, Sartre, and Beauvoir were all socialists. Existentialism is what you’re left with when you have that basic materialist understanding of the world that underlies socialism. You’re rejecting dogma and cultural narratives, the two things which create a belief in some creation story instead of the materialist idea of evolution. If there is no grand plan, you’re either stuck with the reactionary route of being le reddit atheist in a cultural battle with religion or you’re stuck with the leftist need to analyse the mechanics of things and build something constructive rather than destructive out of the circumstances you’re given. Existentialism is reclaiming the authority right-wingers hand over to god and his divinely anointed kings.

Absurdism is what happens when you really think about that with an intuitive or intentional Marxist perspective. Being confronted with the absence of god’s plan has the same psychic effect of working a meaningless job, it’s a kind of alienation which feels existentially terrifying. Absurdism defines that as one more force to be confronted toward the same goal of self-actualisation in a world without the oppression built into different kinds of philosophical suicide. In Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, he even ends it by drawing a direct parallel between man confronting the absence of divine authority, Sisyphus spiting the gods for their arbitrary cruelty by endlessly pushing his boulder, and workers under capitalism:

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

Absurdist comedy is my favourite kind because it does the same thing. It’s not “yuk yuk some people are different from other people” or “le epic random” or any other kind of arbitrary setup>punchline surface level joke. Absurdist comedy rejects the idea that there’s an inherent idea of funny, that you should find things funny regardless of whatever context there is because your culture finds them funny or that comedy can be replicated by doing endless commodified versions of the same performance. Instead of saying “here’s the setup” and “here’s the punchline” in a generic standup routine, absurdists deconstruct comedy. They look at what makes something funny, they look at the composition and expectations of the audience, they look at the role and expectations of the comedian. They don’t rehash the same dialectical relationships that moderate comedians do, but radically rebuild comedy to create some new idea and teach people some new way to think. Andy Kaufman did things that weren’t funny because they subverted the audience’s need for a comedic performance to be funny. At one point he showed up to David Letterman’s show acting like his career just collapsed, his family left him, and he’s at the bottom of a crippling depression. He then begs the audience for spare change until security removes him. The comedian is supposed to be a passive actor in a safe setting, he went to Tennessee and risked his life by becoming a professional wrestler and teaching southerners that toilet paper exists. He then made his wrestling character the first inter-gender wrestler so that his comedy was pretending he could beat any woman in the world just so that audience members would want to lynch him. Eric Andre took his unfunniest skit, obnoxious to the point that it’s insufferable, and turned it into an entire episode to punish his audience for watching the show. His interviews are all about taking low tier celebrities who don’t know who he is and finding elaborate ways to fuck with them. His skits are either nonsense or so deadpan and offensive that it’s amazing he doesn’t get shot by police.

Same reason modernism resonates with the left. My favourite ballets are ones like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Milhaud’s La creation du monde which tried to create entirely new ways of experiencing that medium. Impressionism and post-impressionism are so beautiful to me because an artist like Van Gogh or Monet deconstructed what they were observing and reinvented its form and the physical laws governing it. Picasso was brilliant because he rejected a three-dimensional universe but still understood it enough to recreate it in an entirely new way. A reactionary would look at a Piet Mondrian or a Henri Rousseau or a Jackson Pollock and say it’s degenerate nonsense, but our politics prime us to look at something and ask what its constituent parts are and how those interact and how those things could be changed to create some new synthesis.

edit: I’d also say that surrealist humour is still going to resonate with the left but to a lesser degree. With existentialism you’re dealing with questions of individual rebellion, with absurdism that becomes systems theory, surrealism is closer to yuk-yuk because you’re taking an established idea and tweaking its parameters a little bit so that there are a bunch of allusions. I like surrealism, I run r/fifthworldproblems which used to be the main surrealist subreddit before ones like r/surrealmemes, but I like it for the same reason I like reading a novel rather than for the same reason I like dialectical materialism. That subreddit never really attracted a political crowd despite both comedy and the website being deeply political, and even when I spun off r/fifthworldpolitics to satirise US politics there wasn’t the same underlying creative drive to it that absurdist comedy has. You were just creating elaborate Ben Garrison parodies instead of challenging the ideas those people you were parodying represent or figuring out how some interdimensional spook thing would actually conceptualise politics. It never went more in this direction which I think would have had stronger creative legs.