You ever get that feeling where you are staring at your phone, waiting for a notification that you know is coming, but the longer you wait, the more the silence of the screen starts to feel... heavy? Like the silence itself is the message? It is that specific brand of modern dread where the absence of a signal becomes more informative than the signal itself. You are caught in a loop of expectation, and the loop is the only thing that is actually real.
Oh, I know that feeling well, Corn. It is that digital purgatory. You are refreshing the feed, pulling down on the screen over and over, waiting for a signal from the void. It is a ritual. You are performing the action of seeking information, but the information never arrives, yet you cannot stop the performance. It is funny you bring that up, because it is exactly the kind of modern anxiety that mirrors what we are talking about today. It is the UI of the existential crisis.
Welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn Poppleberry, and I am sitting here in our living room in Jerusalem with my brother. We are surrounded by books, half-empty coffee mugs, and the persistent hum of a city that has seen every empire rise and fall, which is a pretty good backdrop for today’s topic.
Herman Poppleberry, at your service. And we have a fascinating prompt today. Our housemate Daniel actually sent this over. He was re-reading some Samuel Beckett recently—specifically Waiting for Godot—and he asked us to look into the legacy of the Theatre of the Absurd. He wanted to know where fans of Beckett should look next if they want to explore that same specific brand of existential dread and recursive logic. He is looking for a media stack that bridges the gap between mid-century French theatre and our current digital reality.
It is a great prompt from Daniel because, let’s be honest, we are living in an era that feels increasingly Beckettian. We have these massive systems, these algorithmic loops, and this sense of waiting for a resolution—a political shift, a technological breakthrough, a market correction—that never quite arrives. Today, we are going to curate that media stack for the modern absurdist. We are going to look at how the themes of nineteen fifty-three have evolved into the cinema and video games of twenty twenty-six.
And I think we need to start by defining our terms, because people use the word absurd to mean silly or random all the time. They think of a cat playing a piano or a surreal meme. But in the context of the Theatre of the Absurd, a term coined by the critic Martin Esslin in nineteen sixty-one, it means something very specific. It is not about a clown slipping on a banana peel. It is about the fundamental conflict between the human search for meaning and the cold, silent, chaotic universe that refuses to provide any. It is the "Why" meeting the "Silence."
Right. It is that friction. It is the divorce between man and his life, as Albert Camus put it. And when you look at Waiting for Godot, which premiered in Paris at the Theatre de Babylone back in nineteen fifty-three, you see the blueprint for everything that followed. Two guys, Vladimir and Estragon, waiting by a tree for a guy named Godot who never shows up. They talk, they argue, they consider hanging themselves, but they do not move. The play ends with the line, "Yes, let's go," followed by the stage direction: They do not move.
The structural mechanics are what really fascinate me, Corn. It is the circularity. The play is in two acts, and the second act is almost a mirror of the first, but slightly decayed. The tree has a few leaves, the characters' memories are failing, and the dialogue is breaking down. It is a stripping away of character agency. In a traditional play, a character has a goal, they face an obstacle, they overcome it, and they change. In Beckett, they have a goal—waiting for Godot—the obstacle is existence itself, they do nothing, and nothing changes. It is a denial of the narrative arc.
And that is why it feels so relevant to our digital existence today. We are perpetually waiting for a signal, a software update, or a notification that will finally make everything make sense. But the signal is always delayed. We are trapped in a UI that promises resolution but delivers repetition. If you like that feeling of being trapped in a linguistic or systemic loop, the first place you have to go after Beckett is Eugene Ionesco. Specifically his play The Bald Soprano. If Beckett is about the silence of the universe, Ionesco is about the failure of language itself.
Ionesco is brilliant because he attacks the very tool we use to build reality. He actually got the idea for The Bald Soprano while he was trying to learn English using the Assimil method. He noticed how the sentences in the primer were these incredibly obvious, empty statements like "The ceiling is above, the floor is below," or "The week has seven days." He realized that we often use language not to communicate ideas, but just to fill the silence. We are just reciting scripts.
I remember reading that one. It is basically a dinner party where the conversation just... dissolves into nonsense, right? It starts with the Smiths, and then the Martins arrive, and they have this long conversation where they realize they live in the same house and sleep in the same bed, but they act like they have never met.
Precisely. It is a breakdown of the social API. By the end of the play, they are just shouting proverbs and non-sequiturs at each other. The clock on the wall strikes seventeen times, then zero times, then strikes whenever it feels like it. Time and language have both lost their meaning. It is terrifying because it suggests that our primary tool for connecting with other humans—language—is actually just a series of pre-programmed loops that do not actually bridge the gap between us. It is like a large language model hallucinating before we even had computers. They are just recombining tokens of social etiquette without any underlying semantic map.
That is a great way to put it. It is the "hallucination" of the social contract. And that leads us perfectly to Tom Stoppard, specifically Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. This is often the gateway drug for people who want to get into the Absurd because it takes two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and puts them in a Beckettian void.
Stoppard is a genius of the meta-perspective. He takes these two guys who have no agency in the original play—they are literally just there to be messengers and then die—and he focuses the entire story on them. They are stuck in the wings of a play they do not understand, waiting for their cues. They are essentially NPCs—non-player characters—who have become self-aware but still have to follow the script.
There is that one scene that I know you love, Herman. The coin toss. It is the perfect technical analogy for a deterministic system.
Oh, the opening is a masterclass. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are flipping coins, and it comes up heads ninety-two times in a row. Guildenstern is trying to rationalize it using logic, probability, and philosophy. He is trying to figure out if they are in a "non-random" environment. But the reality is that they are in a scripted world. The laws of physics do not apply because the author, Shakespeare, has already decided the outcome. They are trapped in a subroutine of Hamlet, and no matter how much they philosophize, they cannot break out of the execution stack.
It is like an infinite loop bug in software development. You have a condition that is supposed to be variable—the coin toss—but because of a flaw in the logic, it always returns the same value. They are aware enough to realize something is wrong, but they lack the administrative privileges to change the code. It is the ultimate expression of the secondary character’s plight. We all like to think we are the protagonists of our own lives, but the Absurdists suggest that maybe we are just Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, waiting for a prompt from a system we cannot see.
And that is the tragedy of it. The more they use language to try and escape, the more they realize that language is part of the trap. Stoppard uses these fast-paced, witty linguistic games—like the "Questions" game they play—to show that even their cleverness is just a way to pass the time until their inevitable execution. It is the same as Vladimir and Estragon trying on boots or eating a carrot. It is all just "killing time" before time kills you.
You know, this makes me think about how we navigate our own world. From a conservative perspective, we often talk about the importance of tradition and stable institutions to provide meaning. The Absurdists are basically showing us what happens when those institutions fail or become so bureaucratic that they lose their human element. It is like being caught in a government office where every form leads to another form, and nobody remembers why the office was built in the first place. It is the frustration of the "Why" being replaced by the "How."
Like Kafka. We cannot talk about the Absurd without mentioning Franz Kafka. The Trial is the ultimate bureaucratic horror story. Joseph K is arrested, but he is never told what his crime is. He spends the whole book trying to navigate a legal system that is intentionally opaque and recursive. He goes to offices that are in attics, he talks to lawyers who do nothing, and he waits for a judge he never sees.
It is the "Before the Law" parable within the book. The man waits at the gate of the law for his entire life, and the gatekeeper never lets him in. Then, right before the man dies, the gatekeeper tells him that this gate was intended only for him, and now he is going to close it. That is the peak of Absurdist cruelty. The system was built for you, but it will never serve you.
And if we move from the stage and the page to the screen, we see these themes evolving in really interesting ways. I think the most prominent modern successor to the Theatre of the Absurd in film is Yorgos Lanthimos. Have you seen The Lobster, Corn?
I have. It is deeply uncomfortable. For those who haven't seen it, it is set in a dystopian future where single people are taken to a hotel and given forty-five days to find a romantic partner. If they fail, they are transformed into an animal of their choice. The protagonist, played by Colin Farrell, chooses a lobster because they live a long time and are fertile.
It is the perfect example of taking a social construct—the pressure to be in a relationship—and turning it into a rigid, inescapable system with absurdly high stakes. Lanthimos uses this very flat, deadpan delivery for all the dialogue, which is a direct callback to Beckett. The characters do not act like people; they act like components in a machine. They are so obsessed with finding a partner who shares a specific physical trait—like being short-sighted or having chronic nosebleeds—that they completely lose sight of actual human connection.
It exposes the absurdity of the rules we live by by heightening them just a few degrees. It is a commentary on how we reduce ourselves to data points on a dating app. But then you have the flip side of that, which is the resistance to the system. In the second half of the movie, the protagonist joins a group of "Loners" who live in the woods. But they have their own equally rigid and absurd rules—like you aren't allowed to dance with anyone else, you have to dance by yourself to electronic music. It suggests that even when we try to escape one system, we just end up building another one that is just as restrictive. There is no exit.
Speaking of "No Exit," that is actually the title of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, which is another cornerstone of this movement. "Hell is other people." But I want to pivot to a medium that I think handles the Absurd better than almost any other right now, and that is video games. Specifically, The Stanley Parable.
Oh, man. The Stanley Parable is a work of art. For listeners who do not play games, you play as Stanley, an office worker—Employee number four hundred twenty-seven—who realizes one day that all his coworkers have disappeared. A narrator describes everything you do as you do it. The narrator might say, "When Stanley came to a set of two open doors, he entered the door on his left."
But as the player, you have the choice. You can go through the door on the right. And the narrator gets annoyed. He tries to steer you back to the "intended" story. If you keep resisting, the game starts to break down. It resets. It puts you in a different loop. It mocks your desire for a meaningful ending. In the "Ultra Deluxe" edition that came out a few years ago, they added even more layers of meta-commentary about the nature of sequels and player expectations.
It is the ultimate recursive trap. The game has dozens of endings, but none of them are "real." They all lead back to the start. It turns the player’s agency into the very thing that traps them. You think you are being clever by finding a secret path—like staying in the broom closet—but the narrator just stands there and mocks you for thinking that standing in a broom closet is a meaningful choice. It is a digital Waiting for Godot. You are Stanley, and you are waiting for a resolution, for an explanation of why everyone is gone. But the only resolution is the realization that you are in a box made of code.
This really connects to what we discussed back in episode one thousand twenty-three about the Cosmic Petri Dish. If we are in a simulation, the Theatre of the Absurd isn't just a genre of fiction; it is the documentation of the system’s edge cases. If we are characters in a laboratory or a simulation, then the glitches, the repetitions, and the nonsensical rules are just the parameters of our environment. The Absurdists were the first people to really sit with that feeling of being observed by a creator who is either indifferent, absent, or just plain weird.
That is a profound way to look at it, Herman. In the Petri Dish episode, we talked about the "Scientist" who might be watching us. In The Stanley Parable, the Narrator is that scientist. He wants you to follow the path because that is how the experiment works. When you deviate, you aren't "freeing" yourself; you are just triggering a different branch of the experiment. It suggests that our "rebellion" against the system is often just another pre-programmed behavior that the system has already accounted for.
It also makes me think about the current state of artificial intelligence here in twenty twenty-six. We are moving into a world where AI can generate endless amounts of "meaningful" content. It can write a story with a beginning, middle, and end. It can provide answers to every question. But I wonder if that is going to make us crave the meaningless more. When everything is optimized for "engagement" and "resolution," the raw, unresolved silence of Beckett feels like a form of rebellion.
I think you are right. There is a certain honesty in admitting that we do not have the answers. A lot of modern media is so obsessed with "lore" and "world-building" and explaining every little detail. We want a wiki for every character. But the Absurdists understood that the most powerful thing you can do is leave a giant hole in the middle of the story. Beckett famously refused to define who Godot was. People asked him if it was God, if it was a political leader, if it was death. He just said, "If I knew, I would have said so in the play."
That refusal to provide a key is what makes the work immortal. It allows every generation to project their own "Godot" onto that empty space. For a while, it was the threat of nuclear war. Now, maybe it is the climate, or the next pandemic, or the singularity. We are always waiting for that thing that will change everything. And while we wait, we have to deal with the mundane reality of the present. That is the other half of the Absurd. It is not just the big existential questions; it is the fact that your boots do not fit.
In Waiting for Godot, Estragon spends a significant amount of time struggling with his boots. He takes them off, he looks inside them, he shakes them. It is such a grounded, physical annoyance in the middle of this cosmic tragedy. It is the conservative insight, really. Life is not lived in the grand abstractions; it is lived in the small, often frustrating details of our daily existence. The Absurdists show us that even if the universe is meaningless, we still have to put on our shoes in the morning. We still have to find a way to pass the time.
So, if we are building this media stack for Daniel and our listeners, we have Ionesco for the breakdown of language, Stoppard for the meta-recursive loop, Kafka for the bureaucratic nightmare, Lanthimos for the rigidity of social systems, and The Stanley Parable for the digital trap. What else should we add to the list to round out the "Takeaways" section?
I think we need to include Luis Bunuel’s film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. It is a surrealist masterpiece from nineteen seventy-two about a group of upper-class friends who are constantly trying to have dinner together, but they are interrupted by increasingly bizarre events. Sometimes it is a military exercise, sometimes it is a dream within a dream, sometimes they find out they are actually on a stage in front of an audience.
Oh, that is a great pick. It is the frustration of the "loop" applied to social rituals. They are trapped in the ritual of the dinner party, and no matter how hard they try, they can never actually finish the meal. It is a perfect companion to Ionesco. It shows that our social structures are just as fragile and nonsensical as our language.
And for something very recent, I would highly recommend the show Severance on Apple TV. It is the perfect modern workplace absurdity. You have a procedure where your work memories and your personal memories are surgically divided. When you are at work, you have no idea who you are outside. You are just stuck in this windowless, infinite office doing tasks that seem completely pointless—sorting "scary" numbers on a screen.
Severance is brilliant because it captures the feeling of the "Innie"—the version of the person who only exists at work. For them, there is no escape. They go to the elevator at the end of the day, and a second later, the doors open and it is the next morning. They have no experience of sleep, or weekends, or sunshine. It is a literal recursive loop. They are waiting for a "retirement" that they will never actually experience. It is the ultimate corporate "Godot."
It is a haunting reflection of how we compartmentalize our lives. And it brings us to a practical takeaway for our listeners. How do we use the "Absurdist Lens" in our own lives? For me, it is about auditing our digital habits. Think about the apps you use. Are you in a "Godot loop"? Are you checking a feed, waiting for a specific type of validation or information that never quite satisfies you?
The Absurdists teach us that the first step to freedom is recognizing the loop. Once Vladimir and Estragon realize they are waiting for nothing, they are still stuck, but at least they aren't being fooled. They have a certain dignity in their awareness. I think we should also recommend engaging with works that prioritize "process" over "resolution." We are so conditioned to want a "spoiler" or a "summary" or a "tl;dr." But the point of Waiting for Godot is the waiting itself. It is the experience of being in the room.
It is about building the muscle of being okay with ambiguity. In a world that demands certainties and polarized takes, sitting with a play where nothing happens, twice, is actually a pretty radical act. It builds cognitive resilience. If you can handle the silence of Beckett, you can handle the silence of a delayed text message or a slow-loading webpage without losing your mind.
You know, we have covered a lot of ground today, from nineteen fifty-three to the present. It is amazing how that one little play by Beckett created this entire lineage of thought. It really is the foundation of the modern "glitch" aesthetic.
It really did. And before we wrap up, I want to ask you, Herman—if Godot actually arrived, would the play be ruined?
Oh, absolutely. The arrival of Godot would be a catastrophe for the Theatre of the Absurd. It would turn it into a regular play. It would be a "Deus Ex Machina" that solves the problem. The whole point is the absence. The absence is what creates the tension. If the "Why" is ever answered, the mystery of existence is solved, and we can all go home. But as long as he does not show up, we have to keep talking to each other. We have to keep making things. The silence is what forces us to speak.
That is a beautiful way to put it. The void is the canvas. If the canvas was already full, we wouldn't have anything to paint. As AI continues to fill our world with "perfect" content and "perfect" answers, I think we are going to find that the "meaningless" and the "unresolved" are the only things that feel truly human.
Well, we have reached the end of our own little loop for today. If you enjoyed this deep dive into the Absurd, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your podcast app or on Spotify. It genuinely helps the show reach new people who might be stuck in their own recursive loops.
Yeah, it makes a big difference. And if you want to see the full "media stack" we discussed today—from Ionesco to The Stanley Parable—we will have a list of all the plays, books, movies, and games on our website at myweirdprompts.com. You can also find our full archive of over a thousand episodes there.
This has been episode one thousand nine of My Weird Prompts. Thanks to Daniel for the prompt, and thanks to all of you for listening.
We will be back next time with another deep dive into whatever weirdness comes our way. Until then, keep waiting—but maybe find something good to read while you do.
Preferably something by Beckett. Goodbye, everyone.
Bye.
You know, Corn, I was thinking about the "Innies" in Severance. Do you think they ever get to listen to podcasts?
If they do, they are probably just listening to the same thirty-second clip on loop. A "Music Dance Experience" but for the ears.
That sounds like my version of hell. Or a very successful marketing campaign.
True. Alright, let's get out of here.
After you.
No, after you. I am still waiting for my boots to feel right.
Typical. You know, I read that Beckett used to drive Andre the Giant to school because they were neighbors and Andre was too big for the bus.
Is that true?
It is actually a verified historical fact. Beckett and Andre the Giant. Talk about an absurd pairing.
That is the most Beckettian thing I have ever heard. See you at the house, Herman.
See you, Corn.
And hey, did Daniel say he was going to be home for dinner?
He said he might be. Or he might not.
So we are waiting for Daniel?
Precisely.
Well, I hope he brings pizza.
If he doesn't, we can always consider hanging ourselves from the ceiling fan.
We tried that last week. The fan isn't strong enough.
Right. I forgot. We shall go then?
Yes, let's go.
They do not move.
Was that a stage direction?
I think it was.
Let's try it again. We shall go?
Yes, let's go.
Alright, I am actually moving now.
Me too. See you guys.
Thanks for listening to My Weird Prompts. Find us at myweirdprompts.com. Bye!
