Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal

The Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal (CSICON) is featured in the writings of Robert Anton Wilson, who claims American directorship of the committee.

According to Wilson, it was founded by his fictional character Timothy F.X. Finnegan, who wrote, "The normal consists of a null set which nobody and nothing really fits." The committee claims that there is no such thing as "normal", and there are no existing "normal" people (i.e., people existing in the average). For example, no one has 2.3 children.

The Board of the College of Patapsychology, Wilson writes, offered one million Irish pounds to anyone who can produce "a normal sunset, an average Beethoven sonata, an ordinary Playmate of the Month, or any thing or event in space-time that qualifies as normal, average or ordinary."

The committee's name is a parody of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, and the million-pound challenge a parody of the prize offered by James Randi for evidence of paranormal abilities.

Origins
In Wilson's account, CSICON began with a conversation Finnegan heard in a pub between two men named O'Brian and Nolan. They were discussing the strange weather. Another man named Sean Murphy interjected, "Ah, Jaysus. I've never seen a boogerin' normal day. And I never met a fookin' average man neither."

This inspired Finnegan, and the next day he wrote a two-page outline on a new science he dubbed patapsychology. The paper began with the sentence, "The average Canadian has one testicle, just like Adolf Hitler—or, more precisely, the average Canadian has 0.96 testicles, an even sadder plight than Hitler's, if the average Anything actually existed."

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