To accompany the end credits of the 1979 film "Being There," the director, Hal Ashby, inserted a series of outtakes of Sellers, as Chauncey Gardiner, trying to give a particular absurd speech.
It's worth noting that one college we filed against today, Citrus College in California, had already agreed to abolish its absurd speech zone after a 2003 lawsuit and settlement.
Alan Stanford's Pozzo, with his ludicrously plummy English accent, and Stephen Brennan's Lucky, garnishing his famously nonsensical speech with absurd oratorical gestures, are no less engaging entertainers than Didi and Gogo.
I hope that increased attention to the California public college system, inspired by the budget crisis, will help end this ridiculous trend before California finds itself battered both in the courts of law and the courts of public opinion, just like Texas Tech when it tried to defend its absurd "free-speech gazebo".
In Pakistan, where San Bernardino massacre suspect Tashfeen Malik had previously studied, one of the country's most prominent human rights lawyers, Asma Jahangir, called Trump's speech absurd.
One influence was Herbert Marcuse, who argued that liberals' commitment to open debate was absurd, because free speech had become a form of oppression.
Strict regulations on marketing effort -- if a way can be found around the absurd "commercial free speech" doctrine invented by the Supreme Court -- would have direct effects on the volume and content of advertising and indirect effects on the industry's influence on the mass media.
Antitrust would also come into play if, for example, Facebook and Twitter got together and decided to charge twice as much for advertising that includes hate speech (an obviously absurd scenario) – in other words, using their market power to affect pricing of certain types of speech that advertisers use.
But at the same time as asking people to express their views, the government is – with no hint of the absurd – slashing funding for speech and language therapy (SLT).
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn described the claim the Tories were a party for workers as an "absurd lie" in his speech to Labour's annual conference in Brighton.
